A multi-dimensional performance assessment framework for microgrids concerning renewable penetration, reliability, and economics

Aligning with the government energy policies for achieving carbon neutrality, microgrids have been receiving increasing attention recently due to their economic and environmental potential. To facilitate their widespread applications, quantitative and effective performance assessment methods and tools at the planning and design stage are needed. These methods are highly valuable to provide insights for decision-makers regarding their multiple key performance indicators, including renewable penetration, reliability, and economics. This study, therefore, aims to develop a multi-dimensional performance assessment framework for the convenient assessment of microgrids concerning their key performance indicators. An empirical cost model is developed based on the Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) method, which can effectively reduce the computation cost and achieve acceptable accuracy, compared with the conventional exhaustive method. A vacation hotel microgrid on a remote island in Hong Kong is selected to test and verify the effectiveness of the assessment framework. Results show that the proposed framework can effectively quantify the overall microgrid performance concerning renewable penetration, reliability, and economics. Proper renewable energy penetration (about 60%) can achieve a good economic performance concerning different reliability requirements. Enlarging the backup power generation capacity solely is not a reasonable measure to enhance the system reliability, which may result in a significant increase of the overall cost (i.e., up to 6 times).