Determination of Load Characteristics for Electrical Load Analysis in Shipboard Microgrids

Electric load analysis is an important task in early new stage for design of shipboard microgrids (SMGs). The installation generation capacity onboard depends on the accurate result of the analysis, which significantly affects the system economic and secure operations. In the traditional electrical load analysis, the demand factor is often obtained from engineering experiences which can lead to inaccurate analysis results. In order to obtain better results, a methodology for electrical load analysis in SMGs is proposed in this paper. The load analysis spreadsheet is adopted to find the power consumption of key electric loads in SMGs. The actual power consumption of selected loads are collected by intelligent meters. The statistical analysis is then performed to find the critical parameter of each selected load in the load analysis under different operating conditions based on the power measurement of field test and load analysis is performed for estimating system power demand accordingly. Three large practical maritime microgrids are selected for numerical analysis to ensure the performance of proposed method. The proposed method has been adopted by local ship builders in Taiwan to better understand the load characteristics in shipboard microgrids to support various functions of system planning and operation in a more effective manner.