Integration of renewable energy sources, active role of consumers and energy management systems are currently among research priorities in energy systems. This paper proposes an innovative coordinated energy scheduling for a microgrid of neighbor prosumers with different consumption patterns. All prosumers have photovoltaic generation systems, Li-ion batteries as energy storage systems and regular household loads. A genetic algorithm is used to schedule each prosumer's battery charge/discharge, with the aim of reducing energy exchange losses by minimizing the power in the point of interconnection of the microgrid with the main grid, with several advantages compared to classical optimization objectives, and without worsening battery lifespan degradation. Individual and coordinated strategies are compared and self-consumption and self-sufficiency of the prosumers' set are evaluated with the aim of showing the advantage of coordination. The paper concludes that coordinated operation can contribute to improve the exploitation of energy resources in the prosumer microgrid, reducing the amount of energy interchanged with the distribution grid by approximately 13%, and, at the same time, avoiding increasing the battery cycling and consequent degradation.

This paper presents a modified carrier level-shifted based control method for a pulsewidth modulation controlled three-phase three-level T-type quasi-impedance-source inverter. The benefits of the proposed strategy are a uniform distribution of shoot-through states of constant width throughout the fundamental period and the mitigation of the inner capacitors' voltages imbalance. The latter is achieved by means of a proportional-integral controller, which adjusts the relative time application of redundant states. The improved performance is demonstrated in terms of reliability, as the capacitors do not suffer from neutral-point imbalance. The control method can also be implemented in a different multilevel inverter configuration with an impedance-source network. A comprehensive simulation study and several experiments were performed in order to validate the adopted method in situations of imbalanced capacitor voltages.

Microgrids of prosumers are a trendy approach within the smart grid concept, as a way to increase distributed renewable energy penetration within power systems in an efficient and sustainable way. Single prosumer individual management has been previously discussed in literature, usually based on economic profit optimization. In this paper, two novel approaches are proposed: firstly, a different objective function, relative to the mismatch between generated and demanded power, is tested and compared to classical objective function based on energy price, by means of a genetic algorithm method; secondly, this optimization procedure is applied to batteries’ coordinated scheduling of all the prosumers composing a community, instead of single one, which better matches the microgrid concept. These approaches are tested on a microgrid with two household prosumers, in the context of Spanish regulation for self-consumption. Results show noticeably better performance of mismatch objective function and coordinated schedule, in terms of self-consumption and self-sufficiency rates, power and energy interchanges with the main grid, battery degradation and even economic benefits.

In recent years, power systems have experimented a great development as a consequence of the apparition of the distributed generation. Renewable energy sources, active users and electric vehicles play a fundamental role in power systems, which has supposed a new topic research. In this scenario, the figure of prosumer has gained relevance due to the multiple advantages that they can contribute to improve the behavior of power systems and to achieve energy and cost savings. In particular, special attention is focus on photovoltaic (PV) arrays integrated in residential buildings with energy storage systems (ESSs), such as batteries or ultracapacitors (UCs) or even a combination of both in a hybrid energy storage system (HESS). This paper presents an energy management strategy to exchange energy between the batteries and the UCs that form a HESS installed with a PV array in a prosumer dwell in order to maintain its UC bank available to support the energy requirements during the most time possible.

In recent years, power quality has gained importance due to increasing pollution in the electric system as a consequence of the proliferation of non-linear loads connected to the grid. For this reason, research has been intensified on this issue to improve power quality; especially through simulation models development using software tools, which allow studying the possible causes and effects of disturbances on the electric system and testing solutions to mitigate these power quality events. This paper focuses on analyzing by simulation a possible cause, effect and solution of harmonic distortion, as an example of using cloud-based platforms in order to get the power quality requirements of the future Smart Grid.

In recent years, the significant growth of the number of inverters connected to the grid as a consequence of the development of renewable energy sources, especially photovoltaic modules, has caused that focus is on innovative inverter circuitries. This paper presents a comparison between two different configurations of three-phase three-level inverters: the neutral-point-clamped and the T-type. Both topologies have been combined with a quasi-Z-source network in order to obtain the straightforward benefits that it offers, by using a modulation technique which introduces shoot-through states. Conventional carrier based modulation techniques have been modified in order to optimize the switching pattern for the T-type circuit. Moreover, a comprehensive simulation study is performed in order to state if T-type topology could be considered as a good alternative to neutral-point-clamped topology.