Adaptive Load Shedding Technique for Energy Management in Networked Microgrids

Geographically closed isolated microgrids can be connected forming a network of microgrids for providing more quality power with increased reliability. Real-time power balance within individual microgrids and power sharing among the microgrids of islanded microgrid clusters would be challenging due to the current limitation of inverter-based distributed energy resources during contingencies. This paper proposes an adaptive load shedding technique for two interconnected microgrids in islanded operation that has several distributed energy resources such as solar photovoltaics (PV), diesel generator, and energy storage. The number of load shedding stages, shedding amount in each stage, and tripping time are formulated considering the severity of the disturbance and the state of charge level of the energy storage. The performance of the proposed load-shedding scheme is verified using a radial-connected microgrid cluster with two microgrids derived based on a real distribution system. The results illustrate that the proposed adaptive load-shedding scheme can minimize the shedding amount, increasing the system reliability.