This was a team term project for a graduate-level engineering course.

Abstract

Electricity is essential to daily life in the developed world, powering critical systems and services such as hospitals, water supply and wastewater treatment, and other functions. Power outages–such as those driven by increasingly large wildfires and Public Safety Power Shutoffs in California or the recent extreme weather-induced rolling blackouts in Texas–compromise functionality of these critical services. Microgrids that include storage and distributed generation resources can help alleviate some of these stresses, with the ability to isolate or “island” from the main power grid and distribute power locally. However, microgrids have limited storage and generation available; therefore, the ability to prioritize loads and optimize discharge can help to maximize the benefit that these resources provide and minimize harm. This study creates an optimal storage dispatch schedule based on the priority of serving different loads, as well as storage and distributed generation resources available. Results showed that as expected, mean fraction of load served declines with outage duration, and increases with diesel generator fuel available. Additionally, the model tends to serve a large fraction of load for nodes with relatively low demand despite lower relative ranking, while providing less service to nodes with extremely high demand despite a higher relative ranking.

Report

To explore the model in detail, check out its GitHub repository.