Cooperative utilization of electrical and thermal storage systems for uninterruptible supply of a greenhouse Microgrid

A greenhouse (GH) consists of both thermal and electrical loads. As some crops are vulnerable to variations in climate conditions, the greenhouse operation should not be interrupted even during the blackout. Using the Microgrid (MG) concept, the distributed generators can be used to continuously supply the GH loads even during the power outage. Battery Energy storage systems (BESSs) are also required for maintaining frequency stability and peak-shaving. A major part of the GH demand electric are thermal loads. As the thermal energy storage systems (TESSs) are much cheaper than BESSs, it is proposed to cooperatively use both thermal and electrical energy storage systems (ESS) to reduce the overall cost of the required ESS for GH energy management in islanded operation. In this regard, during autonomous operation, the thermal ESS supplies the thermal energy requirements instead of using electricity to supply thermal loads to meet thermal energy requirements. By doing this, the total ESS cost is significantly decreased, almost by 19%, in comparison to the case that the electrical ESS are exclusively used.