Cost-Driven Energy Management Framework for Standalone Low Voltage DC Microgrid

DC Microgrids have become more and more popular due to their wide range of applications in the modern world. In the context of domestic rural electrification applications standalone Low voltage DC (LVDC) microgrids have been quite popular in recent times. With the absence of grid support in standalone systems, voltage stability and energy management are two crucial aspects to be handled. This paper, therefore, presents an effective cost-driven energy management framework (EMF) for the effective utilization of resources with a minimal overall cost of the system. The proposed EMF manages the storage resources effectively and correspondingly modifies the control references to the respective control units of the storage. The cost function corresponding to the system has been framed with due inclusion of the operation and maintenance cost of the different storage units of the system. Due consideration is given to the storage constraints and operational constraints of the system. The proposed EMF is used for the LVDC microgrid and tested under the situations of variations in load, variations in irradiance, and storage constraints. The performance of the proposed EMF on the LVDC microgrid is observed to be effective through the simulations on MATLAB/Simulink platform.