Quantification of the Impact of GHG Emissions on Unit Commitment in Microgrids

The global climate change creates a dire need to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from thermal generation resources (TGRs). While microgrids enable the deeper penetration of renewable resources, their capabilities in combating climate change can fully come to fruition only through short-term planning approaches that expressly assess the entire breadth of impact of GHG emissions. To this end, we propose a novel unit commitment (UC) approach that enables the representation of GHG emissions from TGRs, the stipulation of GHG emission constraints, and the ex-ante evaluation of carbon tax payment. We quantify the relative merits of the proposed approach vis-à-vis the classical UC approach using representative studies. The results indicate that the proposed UC approach yields lower costs than does the classical UC approach and achieves a greater reduction in costs as carbon tax rate increases. Further, increasing carbon tax rates can markedly disincentivize TGR generation under the proposed approach.