Optimal Design of Residential Microgrids with Regard to Fault Occurrence and Possibility of Power Outage

One of the issues which has attracted a lot of attention in the power grid in recent years is the emergence of microgrids. An optimized microgrid design includes choosing the best combination of the available options (distributed generation units, energy storage systems, and load response programs) to supply the microgrid so that the total costs of the microgrid development plan is minimized. In this article, a comprehensive modeling has been conducted for the problem of optimal design of residential microgrids considering the renewable distributed generation units, energy storage systems and controllable loads. This model takes into account the intrinsic stochastic behavior of renewable energy and the uncertainty involving electric load prediction, and thus proper stochastic models for them has been chosen. In order to find the optimal solution, the problem of microgrid design is modeled as an optimization problem with the goal of minimizing the total costs of the microgrid development plan and the optimal response is determined via ant colony optimization algorithm.