Title
Minimizing Transmission Loss in Smart Microgrids by Sharing Renewable Energy.
Abstract
Renewable energy (e.g., solar energy) is an attractive option to provide green energy to homes. Unfortunately, the intermittent nature of renewable energy results in a mismatch between when these sources generate energy and when homes demand it. This mismatch reduces the efficiency of using harvested energy by either (i) requiring batteries to store surplus energy, which typically incurs ∼ 20% energy conversion losses, or (ii) using net metering to transmit surplus energy via the electric grid’s AC lines, which severely limits the maximum percentage of renewable penetration possible. In this article, we propose an alternative structure where nearby homes explicitly share energy with each other to balance local energy harvesting and demand in microgrids. We develop a novel energy sharing approach to determine which homes should share energy, and when to minimize system-wide energy transmission losses in the microgrid. We evaluate our approach in simulation using real traces of solar energy harvesting and home consumption data from a deployment in Amherst, MA. We show that our system (i) reduces the energy loss on the AC line by 64% without requiring large batteries, (ii) performance scales up with larger battery capacities, and (iii) is robust to different energy consumption patterns and energy prediction accuracy in the microgrid.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/2823355
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Design,Measurement,Management,Microgrid,renewable energy,energy sharing,battery
Renewable energy,Solar energy,Energy harvesting,Energy transformation,Engineering,Electrical engineering,Energy consumption,Intermittent energy source,Microgrid,Net metering
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
1
2
2378-962X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
18
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhichuan Huang1809.70
Ting Zhu240730.63
David E. Irwin389998.12
A. Mishra4345.00
Daniel Sadoc Menasché514423.47
Prashant J. Shenoy66386521.30