An optimal design of island micro-grids with minimum investment

Providing electricity to hard-to-reach areas without a nationwide power grid is not cost-effective. In some cases, it even seems impossible. Because it requires high investment costs, including (i) the cost of building transmission lines, (ii) the cost of the right of way on land, and (iii) the cost of installing electricity towers and building materials. Recently, the optimal use of electricity generating sources at the point of consumption has entered a new stage of its evolution to supply electricity to remote and distant places. Hence, the topic of Micro-grids is one of the most important topics in the last decade and much literature has focused on this topic. But the tools and software used to design Micro-grids do not have enough capabilities for their optimal design. Hence, this paper is focused on the design and determining the optimal capacity of Island Micro-grids (IMG), which are composed of renewable energy sources, energy storage systems (batteries), and Diesel Generators (DG), to supply electricity to remote areas. Due to the simultaneous presence of batteries and diesel in a microgrid, a new method for energy management was adopted. In addition, the effects of reactive power on simulation were considered in the present research. In this paper, the simulation method and single-objective function were used to find the best answer. Time simulation and count-based optimization were used to find the most optimal answer, and it guarantees the achievement of an overall optimum.

Keywords:

Island Micro-grids , determining the optimal capacity , renewable resources , operation period cost , and reliability of power sources.