Investigating the Necessity of Distribution Markets in Accomodating High Penetration Microgrids
For power system operators, this work highlights operational challenges from microgrid integration and offers potential solutions, but the analysis is limited to a small test system and lacks quantitative results.
The paper investigates how high penetration of microgrids increases the mismatch between actual and forecasted system loads, and proposes three paradigms to address operational issues, using the IEEE 6-bus test system for numerical studies.
The increased need for reliable, resilient, and high quality power combined with a falling cost of distributed generation technologies has resulted in a rapid growth of microgrid in power systems. Although providing multitude of benefits, the microgrid power transfer with the main grid, which is commonly obtained using economy and reliability consideration, may result in major operational drawbacks, most notably, a large mismatch between actual and forecasted system loads. This paper investigates the impact of high penetration microgrids on the power system net load, and further proposes three paradigms that can be adopted to address the emerging operational issues. The IEEE 6-bus test system is used for numerical studies and to further support the discussions.