Sharing renewable energy in smart microgrids

Renewable energy harvested from the environment is an attractive option for providing 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 u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 4th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems pp. 219 - 228
Main Authors: Zhu, Ting, Huang, Zhichuan, Sharma, Ankur, Su, Jikui, Irwin, David, Mishra, Aditya, Menasche, Daniel, Shenoy, Prashant
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 08.04.2013
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Applied computing > Computers in other domains
Applied computing > Operations research > Industry and manufacturing > Command and control
Batteries
Battery
Energy consumption
Energy harvesting
Energy loss
Energy Sharing
Microgrids
Propagation losses
Renewable Energy
Renewable energy sources
Switches
renewable energy
energy sharing
battery
microgrids
ISBN:1450319963, 9781450319966
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Renewable energy harvested from the environment is an attractive option for providing 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 possible renewable penetration. In this paper, we propose an alternative structure wherein 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 efficiency losses. 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 60% without requiring large batteries, ii) scales up performance with larger battery capacities, and iii) is robust to changes in microgrid topology.
ISBN:1450319963
9781450319966
DOI:10.1145/2502524.2502554