High energy consumption, rising environmental concerns and depleting fossil fuels demand an increase in clean energy production. The enhanced resiliency, efficiency and reliability offered by microgrids with distributed energy resources (DERs) have shown to be a promising alternative to the conventional grid system. Large-sized commercial customers like institutional complexes have put significant efforts to promote sustainability by establishing renewable energy systems at university campuses. This paper proposes the integration of a photovoltaic (PV) system, energy storage system (ESS) and electric vehicles (EV) at a University campus. An optimal energy management system (EMS) is proposed to optimally dispatch the energy from available energy resources. The problem is mapped in a Linear optimization problem and simulations are carried out in MATLAB. Simulation results showed that the proposed EMS ensures the continuous power supply and decreases the energy consumption cost by nearly 45%. The impact of EV as a storage tool is also observed. EVs acting as a source of energy reduced the energy cost by 45.58% and as a load by 19.33%. The impact on the cost for continuous power supply in case of a power outage is also analyzed.
Keywords: distributed energy resources; distributed generation; energy management; microgrid; renewable energy; time of use tariff.