This paper analyses the operational decision making procedures required to address the simultaneous management of energy supplies and requests in a microgrid scenario, in order to best accommodate arbitrary energy availability profiles resulting from an intensive use of renewable energy sources, and to extensively exploit the eventual flexibility of the energy requirements to be fulfilled. The optimization of the resulting short term scheduling problem in deterministic scenarios is addressed through a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) mathematical model, which includes a new hybrid time formulation developed to take profit of the advantages of the procedures based on discrete time representations, while maintaining the ability to identify solutions requiring a continuous time representation, which might be qualitatively different to the ones constrained to consider a fixed time grid for decision-making. The performance of this new time representation has been studied, taking into account the granularity of the model and analyzing the associated trade-offs in front of other alternatives. The promising results obtained with this new formulation encourage further research regarding the development of decision-making tools for the enhanced operation of microgrids.
Storage energy cost [m.u./kWh] Span of the time interval [h],
Duration of consumption [h],
Minimum power supply of source at interval [kW],
Maximum power supply of source at interval [kW], Energy price to be sold to power grid at interval [m.u./kWh] , Minimum electricity storage of system at interval [kWh] , Maximum electricity storage of system at interval [kWh] , Initial storage level of system at interval [kWh] , ,
Period of time in which consumption is active at interval [h],
Maximum initial time of consumption [h],
Target initial time of consumption [h]
Binary variable indicating if consumption is active at interval t