Optimal scheduling of battery energy storage in microgrid to minimize electricity and fuel costs

Optimal scheduling of the battery energy storage (BES) in a microgrid is presented in this paper. The microgrid model in this paper consists of a photovoltaic (PV) power plant, a wind generator (WG), battery energy storage (BES), load, and diesel generator (DG). BES is required to store the generation excess from renewable energy sources (RES). BES also can store energy from the main grid but optimization is required to decide when to charge and discharge the battery. The optimization goal is to minimize electricity costs when the main grid is available and fuel costs when it is not available. The optimization problem in this paper is a linear programming (LP) problem that is modeled and solved with Python Gurobi. Optimization results are presented for different cases. A DG is used only when the main grid is not available due to the high fuel price. Electricity cost from DG is 5.28 times higher than the cost from the grid for the first case and 4.36 times higher for the second case. There is no generation excess in the second case so the battery is not used when the main grid is not available.