Real Time Data-based Demand Side Management Techniques for a Microgrid to Minify the Grid Dependency

Abstract

Renewable energy sources (RES) based microgrids (MGs) are the future of the growing electrical industry. Numerous government and private organizations are working in this sector to increase its penetration to the conventional electrical system. But this expanding industry is hindered by its intermittent nature and expensive cost of storage. To make MG based electrical industry sector more sustainable and promising, a technique, demand side management (DSM) is integrated with the system. This paper proposes the development of two DSM based techniques i.e., non-essential load shifting technique (NELST) and direct load shifting technique (DLST) to maximize the solar photovoltaic (PV) usage and to minimize the operational cost of the MG. These techniques were analyzed with the real time data collected from the installed MG at BITS Pilani, Pilani campus, India and it was found that there was a significant decrement in grid import (GI) and grid export (GE). It was observed from the results that there was a significant increase in the solar PV utilization and significant decrease in the operational cost of the MG.