Modeling of small productive solar processes and their integration into an energy management system for a microgrid

Abstract

The productive use of energy, especially from clean energy sources, improves the socio-economic development of urban and rural communities. Hence, solar energy can be included in the traditional productive processes performed by local communities. Thus, these this new kind of processes are defined as small productive solar processes (SPSPs). The electricity consumption of the SPSPs may be influenced by external weather variables. Furthermore, SPSPs generally have voltage-dependent loads. Consequently, the electrical behavior of such SPSPs is complex; hence, modeling their complicated behavior is challenging, as it influences the performance of microgrid operation. This work proposes a methodology to model and represent the complex electrical behavior of the SPSPs through an extended multi-zone ZIP load model (EMZ-ZIP). This model captures the voltage-dependency and the influence of external weather variables, and it can be properly integrated into an energy management system (EMS). The results show that the proposed methodology i) better captures the voltage-dependence of SPSPs loads, ii) captures the influence that external weather variables may have on the energetic behavior of the SPSPs, iii) has a better performance estimating the parameters of the proposed load model, and iv) improves the technical-economic performance of the microgrid when the EMZ-ZIP is embedded in the EMS.