Distributed Operation of Multi-Microgrids under Censored Communication

Microgrids have a promising future and are becoming an important part of the smart grid. In this study, we present a distributed energy management strategy for interconnected microgrids (MG) equipped with renewable energy (RE) resources (i.e., solar and wind), distributed energy storage systems (ESS), distributed generator (DG). Each microgrid is configured with an energy coalition manager (ECM) responsible for power exchange information sharing and minimizing its operational cost. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used to iteratively solve the optimization problem. Further, the standard ADMM is modified to a censored version which is more communication efficient. In the improved version, the information sharing among neighbors is compared against a predefined threshold. Based on that the ECM shares their local variables to find the optimal solution. A case study is used to evaluate the performance, effectiveness, and scalability of both approaches.