Combined Optimal Sizing and Energy Management of a DC Microgrid using MILP

Optimizing both the sizing and energy management of a microgrid is an important process to ensure that the global system's cost is minimized. In this paper, a cost-minimization problem is formulated using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) to determine the optimal capacity of the electrical resources in a DC microgrid combined with an energy management algorithm over the project lifetime. The formulated MILP optimization problem is solved using CPLEX and GUROBI for determining the capacity of photovoltaics and battery storage systems in a campus microgrid. The simulation results show that the isolated microgrid requires higher resource capacity to fully supply the load locally while the overall cost is obtained 33% lower in grid connected case with the grid electricity price.