Robust Self-Scheduling of PVs-Wind-Diesel Power Generation Units in a Standalone Microgrid under Uncertain Electricity Prices

In the semi-autonomous regions and remote islands, the multiple diesel units are usually used for supplying demand and exchanging power with other adjacent zones. In the risk-aware generation companies consisting of diesel engines, photovoltaic panels (PVs), and wind turbines, the uncertain electricity market prices affect the optimum operating points of these units, the total revenue gained from selling energy to neighbor microgrids, and the daily fuel cost of the diesel generators. Moreover, the output power of the diesel engines is a nonlinear function of their specific fuel consumption at discrete loading intervals. Therefore, this paper aims to present a risk-aware mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem for finding the best generation schedules of the diesel units involving the energy price fluctuations. The total fuel costs of the diesel engines minus the total revenue achieved from procuring power for nearby regions is minimized as a cost objective function satisfying the lower and upper generation bounds in each loading subinterval, the load-generation balance criterion, and the nominal capacities of generating units. The cubic spline interpolation is used for accurately fitting the fuel-power curves of the diesel generators at successive loading subintervals because of its zero norm of residual in comparison with 5${}^{th}$ degree and quadratic polynomials. A benchmark microgrid with six diesel generators, PVs and wind turbines is robustly scheduled using the budget of uncertainty with no need to probability distribution and membership functions of energy prices. It is revealed that this strategy is practical for each price-taker generation company, which desires the risk-aversion production patterns of the diesel power production units against the energy market price uncertainty in a specific operating horizon.