Fair division of generation profile and fuel consumption in isolated micro-grids

Islands and rural areas can decrease their cost of energy by exploiting renewable energy as compared to diesel-only generation. Operation of such isolated micro-grids requires allocation of units for grid stability. Depending on the control strategy employed, the fluctuating renewable production leads to more stressed loading conditions of diesel generators. We propose a control strategy employing fair division of generator allocation using a compensation procedure based on social choice methods. A co-simulation set up with separate power system and control strategy simulators is used to provide a proof-of-concept case study of an isolated micro-grid with two wind turbines and three diesel generators. In comparison with a simple master-slave allocation, the proposed coordination scheme improves the distribution of fuel allocation by 27,5 %, reduces under-load time by 43,5 % and decreases the standard deviation of the under-load distribution between individual diesels by 80,7%.