UCLA

Although the existing traditional power grid can maintain an instantaneous balance between supply and demand, it is constantly facing many problems such as energy crisis, environmental pollution and instable centralized control mode. Regarding to these problems, pioneers have been making efforts in developing microgrid. One key driver of establishing the need of microgrid in research of smart grid is the renewable distributed energy resources. However, it is still challenging to properly integrate them. Primary limitations on renewable distributed energy resources include: intermittency and uncertainty, size and site-dependent, as well as information exchange standardization. In the thesis, author proposes several solutions to address the above-mentioned problems. It includes the study on current status of integration of renewable distributed energy sources into microgrids, the mathematical modeling of each renewable resource such as solar PV panel and wind turbine with energy storage management, the development of forecasting methods by auto-regressive moving average model and persistence method, the design and solution of the optimal sizing and placement of renewable distributed energy by genetic algorithm and nonlinear programming, as well as integration of IEC 61850 into the communication network of the microgrid as a standardization of information exchange. The approaches are performed and validated on three microgrid test beds, to support the fact that renewable distributed energy generation can be gradually and properly integrated into the power grid.