by Nian Liu
The global transition to Smart Grid is justified by the need to satisfy the ever increasing electricity consumption and to guarantee the sustainable and secure supply of the power system. The most important approaches for developing Smart Grid are the integration of renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, etc. In addition to developments on the generation side, advanced management, optimization concepts, algorithms and approaches on the consumer side are also necessary to develop the power system, which satisfies future sustainable needs.
In Smart Grid, energy management is regarded as a core part to improve the renewable energy consumption and energy efficiency. In a strict peer-review process supported by reputed international experts from the domain, high-quality contributions have been selected for publication in the Journal of Modern Power Systems & Clean Energy. Some interesting topics in the domain of energy management are addressed, which can be roughly divided into two aspects: 1) smart transmission system, 2) smart distribution system and demand side.
For the energy management of smart transmission system, centralized optimization is still regarded as the essential approach. The contributions in this aspect mainly focus on how to utilize the large-scale wind and solar power, as well as the potential of flexible loads in demand response. For example, a novel optimal scheduling method considering demand response is proposed for power systems incorporating with large-scale wind power. The proposed method can jointly dispatch the energy resources and demand-side resources to mitigate the fluctuation of load and wind power output. In addition, an attempt is made to examine the impact of mediation of electric vehicles and renewable energy sources into a smart grid. A binary version of fireworks algorithm is used to commit and schedule the thermal units along with the electric vehicles and renewable energy sources efficiently.
For the energy management of smart distribution system and demand side, autonomous and cooperative are two important features in the optimization since there are various types of rational entities participate in the operation, including distributed energy sources, microgrids, energy storages, smart buildings, smart homes, electric vehicles, etc. The contributions related to game theory and distributed optimization are widely presented. For example, the energy trading among interconnected microgrids is promising to improve the economy and reliability of system operations, a distributed energy management method for interconnected operations of combined heat and power microgrids is proposed. During the operation, maximizing local consumption of renewable energy is an important purpose. In consumer side, opportunities and challenges are discussed with the integration of renewable energy source and electric vehicles in the smart home. Several practical scenarios are presented, with different demand profiles, by integrating renewable energy that could be used to charge the electric vehicles.
Summarizing, innovative models, operation strategies, optimization algorithms, as well as integration approaches and methods, as covered by the papers published in MPCE, provide the necessary foundations for the design and implementation of future energy management systems in Smart Grid.
Nian Liu, Associate Professor
State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources
North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China