Impact of wind power prediction quality on the optimal control of microgrids

The present paper addresses the problem of control of power flows in a microgrid endowed with wind electrical energy generation and electrical energy storage. The contribution is twofold: it first investigates the problems related to the design of short-medium term wind energy power predictors, intended for control applications in dispatching electricity problems. Then, such predictors are used in the development of a control system, based on Model Predictive Control (MPC), for a microgrid containing a flexible load, energy storage, wind farm, and a point of common coupling with the national electricity grid. In particular, the paper provides an evaluation of the impact of the above mentioned predictors on the quality of the control scheme. A basic sensitivity analysis is performed to test the dependency of the control results with respect to the main parameters of the MPC.