Integrated demand side management and generation control for frequency control of a microgrid using PSO and FA based controller

This paper investigates demand side management (DSM) method as a new control strategy for frequency control of a microgrid powered by diesel driven generator (DDG), wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) power sources in absence of battery energy storage. Frequency fluctuation due to intermittent power generation is leveled by adjusting the power consumption of the non-critical loads (i.e., heat pump, freezer) and charging-discharging of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) through the demand response controllers beside the automatic generation control of DDG. The parameters of the controllers (PI/PID) are optimized using popular Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Firefly Algorithm (FA). Different disturbance conditions such as step perturbation and random variations of load, solar PV and wind output power are considered to investigate the performance of the microgrid. Simulation studies confirmed that the performance of the FA optimized PID controller is the best among all other the controllers considered in this study in terms of frequency deviation and setting time.