Development Of A Smart Energy Management System In A Community Based Microgrid

ABSTRACT

In this work, an expert system for energy management in community based microgrid was developed. This was necessitated in a bid to address the inadequate power supply predominant in sub-Saharan African countries, while also addressing the problem of energy wastage that comes from individuals supplying their own energy demands. To achieve this, an architecture for a microgrid network was developed by adopting existing standards in the geographical region of interest. An energy management system (EMS) was developed using a modified waterfall model, along with algorithms for the home, sector and central controller units, to perform the energy management tasks within the microgrid. A fuzzy inference system was designed and used to develop an expert system for the control of the energy management system. The result is an expert system software that performs demand response activities and load shedding within the community based microgrid network. The system response to simulated changes in power demand levels was found to correspond to the actions of a human expert and limited the total power demand on the microgrid to 80% of the total distributed power