Optimal Dispatch of a Standalone PV-Diesel-Battery Microgrid using Non-Commercial MINLP Solvers

The paper presents an approach to optimize the dispatch of a standalone microgrid consisting of diesel generators, photovoltaic modules, and battery storage units. The day-ahead unit commitment and economic dispatch of an example microgrid are formulated in the form of a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. The objective function of the optimization problem was defined as a daily sum of the microgrid operational costs. The problem was constrained by the condition of power balance, the unit's minimum up-time and down-time constraints, dispatching availability, minimum and maximum power limits, and the battery storage maximum depth of discharge. Two non-commercial deterministic MINLP solvers were used to solve the formulated problem of finding a global optimal solution for the day-ahead hourly PV-diesel-battery microgrid scheduling.