A sustainable approach to hybrid microgrid design: Optimal sizing and energy management

The growing need for sustainable energy solutions in modern power systems emphasizes the importance of optimizing microgrids to address the critical challenge of effectively managing and integrating local renewable resources, energy storage systems, and electric vehicle charging stations. For this reason, this paper investigates the optimal sizing and energy management of a hybrid grid-connected microgrid incorporating local AC loads, renewable energy units, energy storage systems, and DC loads in the form of an electric vehicle charge station. A comprehensive optimization framework is developed to effectively balance energy supply and demand in order to have minimized levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and life cycle environmental emissions (LCEE). This study also incorporates the annual growth rate of local energy demand into the optimization framework. It is considered to make sure that the size of renewable units and the energy storage system, and also their energy management, will be adaptive to future demand fluctuations. The numerical evaluation of the proposed method demonstrates its effectiveness in optimizing the sustainable microgrid with a low LCOE and a reduced LCEE. The optimized configuration demonstrates superior operational efficiency.