In the power sector, microgrids play a supportive role in bridging the adequacy gap in the conventional electricity supply. Trading of the generated energy has recently been improved by blockchain technology which offers a new cheap, secure, and decentralized transaction approach. Its operation is however associated with an undesired inherent delay during energy transactions initiated by the prosumers, thus, failure to timely attend to incidences of urgent demand could end up in catastrophe at the consumer’s side. This paper thus proposes a cyber-enhanced transactive microgrid model using blockchain technology with optimized participants’ permission protocol to ameliorate this challenge. It is demonstrated that the optimized blockchain participants’ permission model leads to improved transaction speed and greater convenience. The transaction speed simulation is thereafter performed and it was also demonstrated that the node population has a greater effect than the transaction block size on the transaction speed improvement.

Due to increasing load and characteristic stagnation and fluctuations of existing generation systems capacity, the reliability assessment of generation systems is crucial to system adequacy. Furthermore, a rapid load increase could amount to a consequent sudden deficit in the generation supply before the next scheduled assessment. Hence, a reliability assessment is conducted at regular and close intervals to ensure adequacy. This study simulates and establishes the relationship between the load growth and generation capacity using the generation and load data of the IEEE reliability test system (IEEE RTS ‘96 standard). The generation capacity states and the risk model were obtained using the sequential Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) method. The load was gradually increased stepwise and is simulated against the constant generation capacity. In each case, the reliability index was recorded in terms of loss-of-load evaluation (LOLE). The recorded reliability index was thereafter fitted with the load-growth trend by the linear regression approach. A predictive assessment approach is thereafter proffered through the obtained fitting equation. In addition, a reliability threshold is effectively determined at a yield point for a reliability benchmark.

In practical application of microgrid cluster, the lack of full detailed information cause the failure of dynamic modeling. Although some data-driven black-box modeling method can tackle this problem, insufficient usage of prior known physical information may reduce the modeling accuracy. To tackle this challenge, a hybrid physical-data-driven method is proposed for the dynamic behavior modeling of microgrid cluster. Motivated by the equivalence of recurrent neural network (RNN) and differential equations, the differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) of unknown part are represented by gate recurrent unit (GRU) based neural network. The DAEs of prior known physical stage are embedded into the proposed neural network, which avoid unnecessary model training of prior known section and improving the modeling efficiency. At first, the basic idea of RNN based dynamic modeling is explained. Then, the modeling guidelines including data preparation and parameter design are suggested. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by a test system formed by three microgrids under grid fault and operating point changing conditions.

This paper proposes a cyber–physical approach to enhance the prediction accuracy of electricity consumption of solid electric thermal storage (SETS) system, which integrates a physical model and a data-based cyber model. In the cyber–physical model, the prediction error of the physical model is used as an input of the cyber model to further calibrate the prediction error. Firstly, customers’ behavior characteristics are extracted by the integration of K-means and one-versus-one support vector machine. Secondly, based on the behavior characteristics and ambient temperature, the physical model is developed to predict daily electricity consumption. Finally, the error levels of physical model are classified, together with the temperature and prediction values of the physical model, are selected as the inputs of the cyber model using the back propagation (BP) neural network to calibrate the results of the physical model. The effectiveness of the proposed cyber–physical model (CPM) is verified by a 1 MW SETS system. The simulation results show that, compared with the physical model (PM) and cyber model (CM), the maximum relative errors (MRE) with the CPM are reduced to 25.4% and 4.8%, respectively.

The volatility and uncertainty of high-penetration renewable energy (RE) challenge the stability of the power system. To tackle this challenge, an optimal dispatch of high-penetration RE based on flexible resources (FRs) is proposed to enhance the ability of the power system to cope with uncertain disturbances. Firstly, the flexibility of a high-penetration RE integrated power system is analyzed. The flexibility margin of power supply and flexible adaptability of RE are then introduced as the evaluation indices for optimal operation. Finally, a multi-objective optimal dispatch model for power system flexibility enhancement based on FRs under the constraint of flexibility indices is proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed optimal dispatch can effectively enhance the flexibility of the power system and the penetration of RE and reduce pollutant emissions. Compared with the conventional method, the daily average emissions of CO₂, SO₂, and NO_x with the proposed method are reduced by about 83,600 kg, 870 kg, and 370 kg, respectively, the maximum allowable volatility of net load is increased by 7.63%, and the average volatility of net load is reduced by 2.67%.