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NO-LESS: Near optimal curtailment strategy selection for net load balancing in micro grids

Conference ·
 [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
  2. US Army Research Lab, Playa Vista, CA
  3. Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

The integration of renewable energy sources such as solar PVs into micro grids has increased in recent years. However, the intermittent and unpredictable nature of renewable energy generation makes supply uncertain, in turn requiring continuous net load balancing to ensure grid stability. One technique to achieve net load balancing is curtailment, however, selection of the optimal set of curtailment strategies to achieve a targeted curtailment is NP-hard. State-of-the-art curtailment selection techniques approach this problem by either developing computationally expensive optimal curtailment strategies or reduce accuracy to generate sub-optimal solutions quickly. In this work, we develop NO-LESS: a Near OptimaL CurtailmEnt Strategy Selection algorithm. NO-LESS is a novel Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS) which determines bounded (near optimal) curtailment strategies in a small amount of time while simultaneously satisfying practical constraints on strategy switching overhead and curtailment fairness. We perform both theoretical analysis and practical evaluation to show that NO-LESS is a scalable solution for performing net load balancing through curtailment strategy selection in Micro Grids.

Research Organization:
University of Southern California
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Solar Energy Technologies Office (EE-4S)
DOE Contract Number:
EE0008003
OSTI ID:
1607627
Report Number(s):
EE0008003-9
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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