Conference article

In islanded micro-grid design; a proper Distributed Energy Resource (DER) selection; sizing and effective coordination between resources are important and challenging optimization tasks. The types and sizes of renewable energy sources such as wind turbines; photovoltaic panels; fuel cell and the capacities of battery bank and the other distributed generators must be optimized in islanded micro-grid design. In this paper; the problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer minimization problem which minimizes the sum of the total capital; operational and maintenance and replacement cost of DERs; subject to constraints such as energy limits of each DER. This paper proposes Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for solving this minimization problem. The proposed methodology was used to design micro-grid for northwest of Iran. The simulation studies have shown that the proposed methodology provides excellent convergence and feasible optimum solution for sizing of islanded micro-grids using particle swarm optimization. In this paper some notions of reliability are considered for micro-grid; and the effect of reliability on total cost of micro-grid is evaluated.

Micro-grid; Optimal sizing; Particle swarm optimization; Reliability