Renewable energy allocation based on maximum flow modelling within a microgrid

Abstract

This paper designs an energy allocation scheme based on maximum flow modeling for a microgrid containing renewable energy generators and consumer facilities. Basically, the flow graph consists of a set of nodes representing consumers or generators as well as a set of weighted links representing the amount of energy generation, consumer-side demand, and transmission cable capacity. The main idea lies in that a special node is added to account for the interaction with the main grid and that two-pass allocation is executed. In the first pass, the maximum flow solver decides the amount of the insufficiency and thus how much to purchase from the main grid. The second pass runs the flow solver again to fill the energy lack and calculates the surplus of renewable energy generation. The performance measurement result obtained from a prototype implementation shows that the generated energy is stably distributed over multiple consumers until the energy generation reaches the maximum link capacity.