A Micro-Grid Energy Management Strategy Integrating Photovoltaic Energy Prediction

This paper deals with the integration in the electrical grid of distributed generation from renewables through energy management operations at the micro-grid level. We consider in particular a micro-grid with a solar power plant and propose an energy management strategy that sets the energy exchange with the main grid during a one-day time horizon so as to minimize the electrical energy costs. In order to counteract uncertainty, the proposed strategy implements a predictive approach that decides at each time step how to operate the micro-grid on the residual time horizon based on a forecast of the photovoltaic energy production. To this purpose, we introduce a predictor of the photovoltaic energy production that is designed based on historical data. Validation on a testbed and simulation results show that the proposed method is promising.