Microgrid reliability modeling and battery scheduling using stochastic linear programming

•We introduce stochastic linear programming to Operations DER-CAM.•We use a Markov Chain to generate fuel cell outage scenarios.•Battery scheduling is optimized considering uncertainty in fuel cell outages.•Results indicate potential savings by the use of stochastic programming.

This paper describes the introduction of stochastic linear programming into Operations DER-CAM, a tool used to obtain optimal operating schedules for a given microgrid under local economic and environmental conditions. This application follows previous work on optimal scheduling of a lithium-iron-phosphate battery given the output uncertainty of a 1 MW molten carbonate fuel cell. Both are in the Santa Rita Jail microgrid, located in Dublin, California. This fuel cell has proven unreliable, partially justifying the consideration of storage options. Several stochastic DER-CAM runs are executed to compare different scenarios to values obtained by a deterministic approach. Results indicate that using a stochastic approach provides a conservative yet more lucrative battery schedule. Lower expected energy bills result, given fuel cell outages, in potential savings exceeding 6%.