Optimal energy storage sizing and residential load scheduling to improve reliability in islanded operation of distribution grids

Despite the increase of modern residential rooftop solar PhotoVoltaic (PV) installation with smart inverters, islanded operation during grid blackouts is limited for most PV owners. This paper presents an optimization method to construe an resource sharing algorithm for islanded operation during blackouts by using shared PV energy. The optimization methods determine if rooftop PV power is either used directly or distributed to neighbors within a residential subsystem. Residential customers, each with a fixed size rooftop PV system are assumed to be connected by a single point of common coupling to a distribution network. The algorithm derives the optimal power distribution to improve the reliability of electricity supply to each residential customer and the results are benchmarked against the isolated self-consumption only mode. In addition, an energy storage system (ESS) is added to quantify the improvement in reliability, whereas a comparison is made between a distributed and centralized ESS deployment strategy.