Optimal Planning of Microgrids with Considering Load and Renewable Power Generation Uncertainty

This paper presents a novel approach for optimal planning of the multi microgrids (MMGs) under uncertainties in load and renewable power generation. The proposed approach is applied for optimally determining the size, type, number, and site of renewable and dispatchable distribution generation (DG) with optimal allocation of switch for clustering distribution systems into a number of microgrids to economical and reliable structure. The optimization aim is to minimize the totally microgrid planning cost including investment cost, operation and maintenance cost, power losses cost, the pollutants emission cost and the cost of energy not supply (ENS). The system uncertainties are considered using a set of scenarios and a scenario reduction method is applied to enhance a tradeoff between the accuracy of the solution and the computational burden. Cuckoo optimization algorithm (COA) is implemented to minimize the objective function as an optimization algorithm. Also, the effect of optimization coefficients on the planning problem and the robustness of the proposed algorithm are investigated using sensitivity analysis. The efficiency of the proposed method are validated on 33-bus distribution system and the obtained results show that the proposed framework can be considered as an efficient tool for planning of multi microgrids under uncertainty.