Industrial., commercial, and residential facilities are progressively adopting automation and generation capabilities. By having flexible demand and renewable energy generation, traditional passive customers are becoming active participants in electric power system operations. Through profound coordination among grid operators and active customers, the facilities' capability for demand response (DR) and distributed energy resource (DER) management will be valuable asset for ancillary services (ASs). To comply with the increasing demand and flexible energy, utilities urgently require standards, regulations, and programs to efficiently handle load-side resources without trading off stability and reliability. This study reviews different types of customers' flexibilities for DR, highlighting their capabilities and limitations in performing local ancillary services (LASs), which should benefit the power grid by profiting from it through incentive mechanisms. Different financial incentives and techniques employed around the world are presented and discussed. The potential barriers in technical and regulatory aspects are successfully identified and potential solutions along with future guidance are discussed.

Military bases, communities, and university-scale microgrids are being implemented to serve critical loads of high priority. Remote switch scheduling and distributed energy resources (DERs) operation strategies for post-disaster service restoration have been explored in previous literature. Flexible buildings offer the central microgrid management system an opportunity to ensure available energy is directed to critical loads. This work presents a novel bi-level optimal sequence of operations for managing the controllable devices in small-scale microgrids to serve loads based on a priority scheme in campus-scale microgrids. This study introduces a technique for step-by-step restoration of customers’ granular loads. After and during an outage scenario, the facilities’ internal loads are energized in sequence according to their customer and local criticality levels, as well as the amount of energy available from the bulk system and DERs. The proposed methodology is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and adapts to various operating conditions. The proposed method is validated by performing controller hardware-in-loop (CHIL) case studies on the Banshee microgrid benchmark model on a real-time simulator.

This article presents a comprehensive data-driven approach on enhancing grid-connected microgrid grid resilience through advanced forecasting and optimization techniques in the context of power outages. Power outages pose significant challenges to modern societies, affecting various sectors such as industries, households, and critical infrastructures. The research combines statistical analysis, machine-learning algorithms, and optimization methods to address this issue to develop a holistic approach for predicting and mitigating power outage events. The proposed methodology involves the use of Monte Carlo simulations in MATLAB for future outage prediction, training a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for forecasting solar irradiance and load profiles with a dataset spanning from 2009 to 2018, and a hybrid LSTM-Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) model to improve accuracy. Furthermore, the role of battery state of charge (SoC) in enhancing system resilience is explored. The study also assesses the techno-economic advantages of a grid-tied microgrid integrated with solar panels and batteries over conventional grid systems. The proposed methodology and optimization process demonstrate their versatility and applicability to a wide range of microgrid design scenarios comprising solar PV and battery energy storage systems (BESS), making them a valuable resource for enhancing grid resilience and economic efficiency across diverse settings. The results highlight the potential of the proposed approach in strengthening grid resilience by improving autonomy, reducing downtime by 25%, and fostering sustainable energy utilization by 82%.

The utilization of wind energy has become increasingly popular in the United States and many European countries due to its abundant nature and optimized design. While existing wind turbines are predominantly large-scale and not suitable for standalone or distributed power production, Lubbock County in West Texas offers a diverse range of renewable energy options to meet its energy needs. The region relies heavily on utility-scale wind energy sources to supply power to the Texas Grid, replacing conventional fossil fuel-based systems. Currently, standalone solar PV systems are the preferred choice for renewable energy generation. However, West Texas possesses an ample supply of wind energy that can be harnessed to establish a microgrid and provide standalone power to rural communities. Distributed wind energy offers localized power generation, reducing transmission losses and grid strain, while conventional wind farms require long-distance transmission, leading to efficiency gains. By employing the latest technology and optimizing efficiency, even in low-scale generation, a 6-kilowatt permanent magnet alternator-based distributed wind turbine has been designed. This paper focuses on analyzing the techno-economic aspects of implementing this wind turbine in a real-world scenario, taking into account wind attributes, such as velocity and available power, at the specific location.

The outer rotor permanent magnet alternator (PMA) is superior for small wind turbine system due to its robust, little maintenance and low cost configuration. In this research, the design and performance analysis of a radial flux outer rotor type PMA used for gearless, extremely low-speed, and small capacity wind turbine system has been discussed. The design has been simulated to analyze this PMA. The elementary configuration like material types, magnet types and additional electrical and mechanical parameters are studied, and the performances parameters of PMA are improved by changing these elementary electrical and mechanical parameters or some other related factors such as reducing the cogging effect. Cogging torque has been reduced by employing fractional slot per pole, width of slot opening, mounting of the magnets. Also the slot shape has been custom-made to increase the efficiency. The slot fill factor was improved by using different wire diameter used as winding coil. This improvement has been played a great role to reduce copper losses thereby improving the thermal condition of the slot. Finite element analysis (FEA) method was used to analyze this PMA in order to test the real time performance simulation with loss and cogging torque calculation. By taking all these considerations into account, higher efficiency from the outer rotor arrangement with minimum losses has been achieved.

The outer rotor permanent magnet alternator is unrivaled for low-speed wind turbine frameworks because of it's robust structure, low maintenance and construction cost while the inner rotor permanent magnet alternators are most economically accessible for its customary auxiliary setup. In this research, a comparative study of design and performance analysis between an inner rotor PMA and an outer rotor PMA used for low-speed and small capacity wind turbine system has been overviewed using simulation. The basic setup like materials, magnets and some electrical and mechanical parameters are concentrated on, and the performance parameters of PMAs are observed by changing these rudimentary electromechanical parameters. By considering all of these contemplations, higher productivity from the outer rotor PMA with higher efficiency has been accomplished compared to that of inner rotor PAMs for low-speed wind turbine system.