Distributed Energy Management for Networked Microgrids Using Online Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers with Regret

This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for online energy management in networked microgrids with a high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). The implementation of networked microgrids with high penetration of DERs brings power generation closer to electricity users, which has advantages of increasing power supply efficiency and reliability by shortening the power supply delivery distance between the main grid and the electricity users. However, a high penetration of DERs introduces high variability and uncertainty of the power generation into the microgrids. In general, state-of-the-art forecasting for non-dispatchable DERs such as wind and solar is not sufficiently accurate, which results in inaccurate energy scheduling. To address the high variability and uncertainty of DERs in networked microgrids, we propose a novel online energy management algorithm using the online Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) which does not require any a priori knowledge about the future power generation from the DERs to proceed. Despite the lack of the knowledge on DER forecasts, there exists an analytical guarantee that the energy scheduling solution generated by the algorithm converges to the optimal one and minimizes the regret. Furthermore, the proposed energy management algorithm does not require the inner loop subroutines of the typical ADMM algorithm to be fully executed, which further leads to the substantial reduction of the implementation time and the mitigation of the communication demand. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by various numerical examples.