Assessing the Value of Proactive Microgrid Scheduling

Microgrids and multi-microgrids are commonly installed to fulfill rising flexibility needs and to boost the system resilience by advanced fault mitigation capabilities. On top of a complex control architecture, proactive resilient scheduling optimizes the operation of such grids in advance. Although several scheduling algorithms include measures to limit the effects of faults, the impact of proactive scheduling on the system resilience is not widely assessed. This work presents an advanced simulation-based assessment method that includes an extended power flow formulation to consider low-level control and device capabilities even in islanded mode. A case study assesses resilience gains and costs of proactive scheduling based on multiple algorithms and an extensive set of operating conditions. It turned out that even on a suitable test grid that is specifically designed to challenge scheduling algorithms, a large share of the faults can already be handled by low-level controls without the need of considering them in scheduling. However, the remaining share of unhandled faults can be well influenced by advanced proactive scheduling algorithms and an appropriate resilience constraint formulation. Given the evaluation results, it can be supported that in less critical applications, scheduling focuses on economic aspects only without considering fault mitigation. Nevertheless, a detailed assessment is needed to justify the algorithmic choice and to improve the quality of resilient algorithms. The presented method adds a tool that can efficiently assess the value of proactive scheduling based on extensive simulations.