In the revolution of green energy development, microgrids with renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and fuel cells are becoming a popular and effective way of controlling and managing these sources. On the other hand, owing to the intermittency and wide range of dynamic responses of renewable energy sources, battery energy-storage systems have become an integral feature of microgrids. Intelligent energy management and battery sizing are essential requirements in the microgrids to ensure the optimal use of the renewable sources and reduce conventional fuel utilization in such complex systems. This paper presents a novel approach to meet these requirements by using the grey wolf optimization (GWO) technique. The proposed algorithm is implemented for different scenarios, and the numerical simulation results are compared with other optimization methods including the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), the Bat algorithm (BA), and the improved bat algorithm (IBA). The proposed method (GWO) shows outstanding results and superior performance compared with other algorithms in terms of solution quality and computational efficiency. The numerical results show that the GWO with a smart utilization of battery energy storage (BES) helped to minimize the operational costs of microgrid by 33.185% in comparison with GA, PSO, BA and IBA.

With the advent of the new information technologies, the power communication service object is continuously enhanced by the modernization level of the switches architecture designed in the substation automation environment. In the futuristic plan, the communication network not only provides a transmission line between devices, but also takes into account the reliability and efficiency of the power system communication network. Many protocols are used for the provision of faster and more robust communication among control centers, Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs). These protocols support the exchange of a wide range of possible common data that is organized by a DATA-SET, such as in synchronized circuit breaker switching, distance protection and overcurrent protection. However, these protocols do not give the expected performance with standard switches architectures due to the remarkable traffic in power system communication. To address this issue, this paper modelled a substation automation switch based on the packet forwarder technique based on Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol with different architectures of substation automation switches based International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 standard. Finally, the simulations results found that the architecture of the four-switch system showed a significant performance, as compared with other architectures.