Distributed AC-DC Optimal Power Dispatch of VSC-Based Energy Routers in Smart Microgrids

This paper presents a novel model of voltage source converter (VSC) based energy routers (ERs) in microgrids. The proposed model explicitly describes the circuit laws within the ERs and captures the coupling of control variables among the AC/DC, DC/DC, DC/AC links. Therefore, the proposed model possesses unparalleled control capabilities in the operational parameters of both the AC and DC sides of ERs. By incorporating such a model into the AC-DC optimal power flow formulation, we not only optimize the power flows between the AC and DC sides of ERs, but also strategically schedule the flexible resources. To solve the ERs based AC-DC optimal power flow (ER-OPF) in a distributed fashion, we propose a hierarchical distributed optimization method that decouples the power grids into a master region and several sub-regions. In the master region, we propose a sequence of strong relaxations to transform the problem into a semidefinite program (SDP). We further show that this SDP relaxation is exact. For the sub-regions, we utilize sequential quadratic programming (SQP) to solve multiple small-scale subproblems with non-convex constraints in parallel. Case studies on the IEEE benchmark system show that fuel costs and power losses are reduced dramatically by utilizing ERs in microgrids. In addition, the proposed distributed algorithm can converge faster than alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM).