by Zhaohong Bie
Smart Grid is a modern integrated power system with renewable energy resources, batteries and storages, and advanced equipment. Based on an integrated, high-speed communication network, it uses advanced sensing and measurement technologies, advanced equipment technologies and advanced control methods to achieve goals of reliable, flexible, efficient, sustainable, economic, environment-friendly and safe-use of the power grid. Its main features like providing the power quality required by users, access to diversified forms of generation, organizing the electricity market as well as ensuring optimization and efficient operation, have aroused worldwide interests from various researching fields.
As renewable energy has rapidly grown in the 21st century, its intermittency and fluctuation challenge the planning and operation of power systems. To deal with this issue, our research paid major attention to the operation optimization of the Smart Grid and renewable integration, contributing to the realization of large-scale renewable energy integration into the Smart Grid in a secure and economical way. To address the uncertainty of renewables, a novel optimal scheduling considering the demand-side participation was proposed to incorporate large-scale renewable power and meanwhile enhance the economy of the power system. By jointly dispatching the renewable energy and demand-side resources, the proposed method is able to mitigate the fluctuation of load and wind power output. We adopted the real-time pricing in the optimal scheduling, a common method to guide the power customers’ consumption behavior with the price signal, to manage demand-side resources and promote the economic operation. Although demand response brings economic benefits for both power suppliers and customers, it affects the convenience of the customers to some extent. Therefore, customer satisfaction indices were introduced as constraints to reduce the impact on end-users and avoid extreme demand adjustment. To make the model solvable, a proximate decoupling technique is used to cope with the customer satisfaction constraints in the model which are concave. Numerical results demonstrated that the proposed model can significantly reduce the operation cost of power systems while the demand response meets customer satisfaction. Especially, the total start-up costs of conventional thermal units decreased dramatically due to decreased startup times. The abovementioned research has been presented in the paper entitled “Optimal scheduling of power systems considering demand response”, published in the Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy (MPCE) in 2016, Volume 4, Number 2.
MPCE, as the first international power engineering journal originated in mainland China, has presented a lot of top-level academic achievements in the fields of modern power systems, especially smart grid technology and renewable energy integration, and has made notable contributions to promoting the development and popularization of Smart Grid. From 2013 to 2017, MPCE has organized and published 15 Special Issues and Special Sections relative to Smart Grid with a wide scope, including renewable energy technologies, managing electricity demand, risk evaluation and management, modern optimization techniques of operation and planning, wide area monitoring, protection and control in future smart grid, etc. As worldwide concerns are raised in the energy crisis, carbon emissions and environmental pollution, a future energy system called Energy Internet or Integrated Energy System which is energy-efficient and sustainable has gained wide attention in the research field. In the future, Smart Grid with advanced and smart technologies will play an essential role in Energy Internet to interconnect other energy carriers and energy networks. Therefore, it is meaningful for MPCE to focus on the future development of Smart Grid connecting with the concept and scope of Energy Internet or Integrated Energy System.
Zhaohong Bie, Prof
State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment
Department of Electrical Engineering
Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China