Abdulelah H. Habib

Amir Valibeygi, Abdulelah H. Habib, Raymond A. de Callafon

A robust power scheduling algorithm is proposed to schedule power flow between the main electricity grid and a microgird with solar energy generation and battery energy storage subject to uncertainty in solar energy production. To avoid over-conservatism in power scheduling while guaranteeing robustness against uncertainties, time-varying "soft" constraints on the State of Charge (SoC) of the battery are proposed. These soft constraints allow SoC limit violation at steps far from the current step but aim to minimize such violations in a controlled manner. The model predictive formulation of the problem over a receding time horizon ensures that the resulting solution eventually conforms to the hard SoC limits of the system at every step. The optimization problem for each step is formulated as a quadratic programming problem that is solved iteratively to find the soft constraints that are closest to the hard ones and still yield a feasible solution. Optimization results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

Zeyad Awwad, Abdulaziz Alharbi, Abdulelah H. Habib et al.

With the growth of residential rooftop PV adoption in recent decades, the problem of effective layout design has become increasingly important in recent years. Although a number of automated methods have been introduced, these tend to rely on simplifying assumptions and heuristics to improve computational tractability. We demonstrate a fully automated layout design pipeline that attempts to solve a more general formulation with greater geometric flexibility that accounts for shading losses. Our approach generates rooftop areas from satellite imagery and uses MINLP optimization to select panel positions, azimuth angles and tilt angles on an individual basis rather than imposing any predefined layouts. Our results demonstrate that shading plays a critical role in automated rooftop PV optimization and significantly changes the resulting layouts. Additionally, they suggest that, although several common heuristics are often effective, they may not be universally suitable due to complications resulting from geometric restrictions and shading losses. Finally, we evaluate a few specific heuristics from the literature and propose a potential new rule of thumb that may help improve rooftop solar energy potential when shading effects are considered.