Sizing and Operation of an Isolated Microgrid with Building Thermal Dynamics and Cold Storage

An effective way to properly integrate renewable energy sources and to exploit the available flexibility in a decentralized manner is through the development of microgrids. It has been demonstrated that the use of an ice-based cold storage system can reduce the total cost of energy in the context of an isolated microgrid where the main goal is the procurement of the electrical and cooling demand. In this paper, we consider as an additional source of flexibility the potential from the thermal inertia of the buildings. To this end, a controller that takes into account as an optimization variable the interior temperature of the buildings is developed. Additional to the flexibility, a better utilization of the available renewable resources can thus be acquired. A simulator is implemented in which every microgrid component is modeled in detail in order to simulate the operations of the entire system. The results show that the combination of the cold storage system with the dynamic control of the indoors temperature can reduce the operating costs of the microgrid by 68%.