The energy crisis and increasing concerns about the environment in modern society have fostered the development of the integrated energy system (IES) in smart grid. The energy hub (EH) is a minimum construction of the IES. The chief purpose of this paper is to propose a Lyapunov optimizationbased energy management strategy for the energy hub with an energy router. First, this paper describes a configuration of the EH with an energy router and sets the basic operating principles of the energy router. Second, a method is proposed to analyze the energy balance equations of the EH. Furthermore, the problem of energy management is formulated considering the constraints of energy balance equations, energy storage, flexible loads, and other constraints of operation. Finally, energy storage and flexible electric loads are modeled as stochastic processes, and three virtual queues are constructed to relax these constraints. The Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty function is applied to formulate a relaxed form of the energy management problem. Case studies of a single EH and two-connected EHs are performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, and the results are compared with a greedy algorithm.

This paper proposes an optimal design algorithm for distributed secondary voltage control in islanded microgrids (MGs), including communication topology and controller gains. First, upon the consensus-based secondary voltage control, the sufficient condition for network connectivity of communication topology is revealed by the reachability matrix. A multi-objective optimization criterion is first proposed for the network design, taking the convergence performance, network-relevant time delays and communication costs into consideration. After obtaining the Pareto frontier of this multi-objective model, an optimal network is selected to meet the practical requirements. Based on static output feedback, a small-signal dynamic model of a MG installed with a secondary voltage controller is established, where the distributed secondary voltage controller can be converted into an equivalent decentralized controller. Thereby, a linear quadratic regulator is formulated for the near-optimal design of controller parameters. Our approach customizes the optimal design framework of the topology and controller, which have been largely ignored in the existing literatures. Therefore, it promises to improve the performance of distributed secondary control. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is verified by a simulation study.

This paper investigates and compares various modulation methods and capacitor voltage-balancing algorithms of modular multilevel converter (MMC) for solid-state transformer (SST) applications. Characteristics of capacitor charging and discharging are analyzed for the existing single-step alternating voltage-balancing and the conventional sorting algorithms with phase-shift (PS) modulation and nearest-level control (NLC) methods. Based on the analysis, the single-step alternating algorithm leads to a low-frequency voltage ripple while the conventional sorting algorithm introduces additional switching actions. To address these issues, two new voltage-balancing algorithms are proposed, i.e., a multi-step alternating voltage-balancing algorithm and a current-less sorting algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithms with the PS and NLC modulation methods are comprehensively investigated and compared based on theoretically analysis and experimental results. The study results demonstrate the capability of the proposed methods to balance capacitor voltages while reducing the low-frequency voltage ripple and avoiding additional switching actions.

This work presents a method for distribution network reconfiguration with the simultaneous consideration of distributed generation (DG) allocation. The uncertainties of load fluctuation before the network reconfiguration are also considered. Three optimal objectives, including minimal line loss cost, minimum Expected Energy Not Supplied, and minimum switch operation cost, are investigated. The multi-objective optimization problem is further transformed into a single-objective optimization problem by utilizing weighting factors. The proposed network reconfiguration method includes two periods. The first period is to create a feasible topology network by using binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO). Then the DG allocation problem is solved by utilizing sensitivity analysis and a Harmony Search algorithm (HSA). In the meanwhile, interval analysis is applied to deal with the uncertainties of load and devices parameters. Test cases are studied using the standard IEEE 33-bus and PG&E 69-bus systems. Different scenarios and comparisons are analyzed in the experiments. The results show the applicability of the proposed method. The performance analysis of the proposed method is also investigated. The computational results indicate that the proposed network reconfiguration algorithm is feasible.

In this paper, a neural network model called Long Short-Term Temporal Convolutional Network (LST-TCN) model is proposed for short-term load forecasting. This model refers to the 1-D fully convolution network, causal convolution, and void convolution structure. In the convolution layer, a residual connection layer is added. Additionally, the model makes use of two networks to extract features from long-term data and periodic short-term data, respectively, and fuses the two features to calculate the final predicted value. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) are used as comparison algorithms to train and forecast 3 h, 6 h, 12 h, 24 h, and 48 h ahead of daily electricity load together with LST-TCN. Three different performance metrics, including pinball loss, root mean squared error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (RASE), were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The results of the test set proved that LST-TCN has better generalization effects and smaller prediction errors. The algorithm has a pinball loss of 1.2453 for 3 h ahead forecast and a pinball loss of 1.4885 for 48 h ahead forecast. Generally speaking, LST-TCN has better performance than LSTM, TCN, and other algorithms.

In this paper, a reactive power optimization method based on historical data is investigated to solve the dynamic reactive power optimization problem in distribution network. In order to reflect the variation of loads, network loads are represented in a form of random matrix. Load similarity (LS) is defined to measure the degree of similarity between the loads in different days and the calculation method of the load similarity of load random matrix (LRM) is presented. By calculating the load similarity between the forecasting random matrix and the random matrix of historical load, the historical reactive power optimization dispatching scheme that most matches the forecasting load can be found for reactive power control usage. The differences of daily load curves between working days and weekends in different seasons are considered in the proposed method. The proposed method is tested on a standard 14 nodes distribution network with three different types of load. The computational result demonstrates that the proposed method for reactive power optimization is fast, feasible and effective in distribution network.