Consensus + Innovations Approach for Distributed Multiagent Coordination in a Microgrid

Distributed energy resources and demand side management are expected to become more prevalent in the future electric power system. Coordinating the increased number of grid participants in an efficient and reliable way is going to be a major challenge. A potential solution is the employment of a distributed energy management approach which uses intelligence distributed over the grid to balance supply and demand. In this paper, we specifically consider the situation in which distributed resources and loads form microgrids within the bulk power system in which load is supplied by local generation. A distributed energy management approach based on the consensus + innovations method is presented and used to coordinate local generation, flexible load and storage devices within the microgrid. The approach takes advantage of the fact that in the optimum the marginal costs given as a function of the power output/consumption needs to be equal for all the network entities (agents). Solutions for single time step as well as multi time step optimization including inter-temporal constraints are presented.