Effects of Upside Risk on Microgrids' Reliability Considering the COVID-19 Pandemic

The power systems in the areas of human resources and customer demand were greatly impacted by COVID-19 due to a series of restrictions on human movements, lockdowns of factories, and several job losses during the period. In situations like this, the use of microgrids may help attain a balance in the consumption and generation of power, thereby leading to customer satisfaction. The energy resources' optimal power scheduling in a standalone microgrid, taking into consideration the upside risk (UR), is proposed in this work. The standalone microgrid is made up of different energy resources such as a diesel generator (DSG), photovoltaic (PV), wind turbine (WT), and battery storage system (BSS). In this paper, the energy not supplied (ENS) is minimized in standalone mode by considering the effects of COVID-19. The UR is the change between the actual and target ENS when the target ENS is greater than the actual. Also, COVID-19 led to a significant reduction in the ENS.