Power System Monitoring and Control

9Microgrid Control: Concepts and Classification

Currently, economical harvesting of electrical energy on a large scale considering the environmental issues is undoubtedly one of the main challenges. As a solution micro/smart grids promise to facilitate the wide penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) and energy storage devices into the power systems, reduce system losses and greenhouse gas emissions, and increase the reliability of electricity supply to customers. Due to their potential benefits of providing secure, reliable, efficient, sustainable, and environmentally friendly electricity from RESs, the interest on micro/smart grids is growing.

Microgrids (MGs), as basic elements of future smart grids, have an important role in increasing the grid efficiency, reliability, and satisfying the environmental issues. Although the concept of microgrids is already established, the control strategies and energy management systems for microgrids, which cover power interchange, system stability, frequency and voltage regulation, active and reactive power control, islanding detection, grid synchronization, and system recovery are still under development. In this chapter, a comprehensive review on various microgrid control loops and relevant standards are given with a discussion on the challenges of microgrid controls. A summary of this chapter has already been presented in Ref. [1].

9.1 Microgrids

A microgrid (MG) is an interconnection of domestic distributed loads and low-voltage ...