Countries all over the world are shifting from conventional and fossil fuel-based energy systems to more sustainable energy systems (renewable energy-based systems). To effectively integrate renewable sources of energy, multi-directional power flow and control are required, and to facilitate this multi-directional power flow, peer-to-peer (P2P) trading is employed. For a safe, secure, and reliable P2P trading system, a secure communication gateway and a cryptographically secure data storage mechanism are required. This paper explores the uses of blockchain (BC) in renewable energy (RE) integration into the grid. We shed light on four primary areas: P2P energy trading, the green hydrogen supply chain, demand response (DR) programmes, and the tracking of RE certificates (RECs). In addition, we investigate how BC can address the existing challenges in these domains and overcome these hurdles to realise a decentralised energy ecosystem. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of how BC technology can act as a catalyst for a multi-directional energy flow, ultimately revolutionising the way energy is generated, managed, and consumed.

In electrical power system, economic load dispatch is a generic operation for optimal sharing of generation units to meet the system load. With the rapid development of the renewable infrastructure and wide encouragement for green energy have emerged hybrid generating systems in power systems. However, there continuous ever‐increasing production is creating challenges as well as implicating economic factor also in operation. A collective cost function is considered with the conventional thermal generators along with the consideration of renewable energy sources to envisage the economic factor. For these renewable sources, like wind and solar, the proportional cost, their uncertainty and variability by overestimation and underestimation cost are considered. To achieve this economic day‐ahead scheduling, dynamic operation in time scale of 1 h interval is performed. The stochastic nature of wind and solar is modelled by Weibull and Beta distributions, respectively. Moreover, economic optimisation is obtained by a newly developed algorithm called improved fireworks algorithm with non‐uniform operator (IFWA‐NMO). This introduces adaptive dimension strategy, limiting mapping operator and non‐uniform operator. The effectiveness of proposed IFWA‐NMO is investigated on standard dynamic economic load dispatch (DELD) system and also employed to solve conventional DELD with wind‐solar system.

The present research investigations in power management fraternity are focused towards the realization of smart microgrid (MG) technologies. Due to intrinsic advantages of Direct Current (DC) system in terms of compatibility with power generation sources, modern loads and storage devices, DC MG has becoming popular over Alternate Current (AC) system. A secondary voltage and current control schemes of DC MG system are mainly based on the distributed consensus control of Multi-agent system (MAS) to balance generation and the demand. The basic concern of the cooperative control of MAS is consensus, which is to design a suitable control law such that the output of all agents can achieve synchronization. The distributed consensus algorithm requires much less computational power and information exchange in between the neighbor's agent. Meanwhile the other controllers such as model predictive control (MPC) requires accurate dynamic models with high computational cost and it suffers from lack of flexibility. The hierarchical consensus control technique is classified into three levels according to their features, namely primary, secondary, and tertiary. MAS is a popular distributed platform to efficiently manage the secondary control level for synchronization and communication among the power converters in autonomous MGs. In this article, various primary control techniques for local voltage control, voltage restoration in the secondary control level and tertiary control for energy management techniques are discussed. With this, the key emphasis to reduce the voltage deviation and disturbances in a heterogeneous DC MG network solutions are discussed. Furthermore, to analyze the system response and the charging and discharging characteristics of the battery unit, the developed second order heterogeneous consensus controller is compared with the traditional homogeneous consensus control and droop control methods. Finally a detailed discussion on simulation case study using heterogeneous consensus control method over the traditional methods are provided using MATLAB/Simulink platform.

In this work, a DC microgrid consists of a solar photovoltaic, wind power system and fuel cells as sources interlinked with the utility grid. The appropriate sizing and positioning of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) and renewable energy sources (RESs) are concurrently determined to curtail the negative impact of their placement on the distribution network’s operational parameters. The charging station location problem is presented in a multi-objective context comprising voltage stability, reliability, the power loss (VRP) index and cost as objective functions. RES and EVCS location and capacity are chosen as the objective variables. The objective functions are tested on modified IEEE 33 and 123-bus radial distribution systems. The minimum value of cost obtained is USD 2.0250 × 10⁶ for the proposed case. The minimum value of the VRP index is obtained by innovative scheme 6, i.e., 9.6985 and 17.34 on 33-bus and 123-bus test systems, respectively. The EVCSs on medium- and large-scale networks are optimally placed at bus numbers 2, 19, 20; 16, 43, and 107. There is a substantial rise in the voltage profile and a decline in the VRP index with RESs’ optimal placement at bus numbers 2, 18, 30; 60, 72, and 102. The location and size of an EVCS and RESs are optimized by the modified teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO) technique, and the results show the effectiveness of RESs in reducing the VRP index using the proposed algorithm.

The unpredictable nature of the loads and non-linearity of the components of microgrid systems make optimal scheduling more complex. In this paper, a deterministic optimal load-scheduling problem is developed for microgrids operating in both islanding and grid-connected mode under different energy scenarios. Various cases are considered in this research, based on the interaction and dynamic behavior of the microgrid, considering electric vehicles (EVs) in the scenario. The aim of this research is to minimize the overall cost of microgrid operations. The concept of dynamic pricing has also been introduced in order to optimize the energy cost for the consumers. For ensuring the stability of the microgrids, a load variance index has been considered, and the fuzzy-based approach has been used for cost and load variance minimization to reduce the operation cost without compromising the stability of the microgrid. The grid-to-vehicle (G2V) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) operations of EVs are integrated into the microgrid, which would help in valley filling and peak shaving of the loads during the off-peak and peak hours, respectively. In order to solve the proposed complex combinatorial optimization problem, elephant herding optimization (EHO) is modified and implemented. The performance of the proposed improved EHO (IEHO) is first tested on the latest CEC test functions. The results obtained by IEHO after 100 different trials are compared with the latest published methods and are found to be better based on the average value and the standard deviation for different CEC test functions. In addition, the simulation results obtained by particle swarm optimization (PSO), EHO, and proposed IEHO on a microgrid test system for different scenarios with all cases reveal that the proposed model with a mix of energy resources in the dynamic load dispatch environment bring the maximum benefits of microgrid systems. Furthermore, the results obtained from the simulation verifies that if free trade of power is allowed between the microgrids and the main grid, the process of power generation can be more economical, and further introduction of dynamic pricing into the scenario proves to be even cheaper. The implementation of the G2V and V2G operations of EVs operations in the proposed scenario not only helped in cost minimization but also helped in stabilizing the grid.