Abstract:
The renewable energy employment and its application in electricity distribution and sub-transmission network is quite crucial in this century. This is in fact due to greenhouse gases emission growth along with the fossil fuel resources reduction and demand response in different parts of world. Hence, the microgrids (MGs) design, development and implementation is becoming essential and has been studied over the last decade as MGs are able to support residential and commercial buildings using low voltage and power scale resources such as solar (PV) arrays, wind turbines, micro-hydro power plant (MHPP), electric vehicle (EV) charging/discharging stations, and battery energy storage systems (BESSs). Hence, the research work in this thesis has specifically focused on optimal operation of multi-energy hubs considering demand response and will investigate the potential of microgrid systems in residential demand response and structures. Various literatures are studied in detail, and HOMER software is used to simulate daily action for PV arrays, wind turbines, MHPP, and consumption of offices, and number of scenarios are emulated and discussed. This thesis is focused to study 13 different scenarios for a grid-connected microgrid and evaluate their performances. Also, BESS charging and discharging using two types of lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries are studied and discussed. The economic viability, daily demand request, and energy output are also analyzed. It is shown that how different renewable energy resources will influence the demand response and can reduce the energy cost. This, in turn, led to the reduction of daily electricity expenses by a maximum of 83%, whereas a fully self-sufficient design demonstrated 100% savings. Moreover, besides minimizing the expenses to 0%, the analyzed setup in this thesis is supportive to earn a daily profit of $ 15.7 for residential building.