Concise review of microgrid concepts and architecture

Abstract

Energy plays an essential role in economic growth. Access to modern energy service is essential for people health and well-being. But the rapid and constant growth of energy demand worldwide, has raised problems like supply difficulties and heavy environmental impacts (global warming, climate change, etc.). To better cope with challenges of the need for more energy and CO2 reduction, the actual electric power system have to be rethought. Microgrid has been revealed throughout the world in recent years as the best solution to provide reliable, less expensive, high quality and green electric energy.

Various distributed energy resource (DER) especially those based on renewable energy resources are used in microgrid. The purpose of this paper is to propose a review of microgrid concepts given in the literature and also present recent DER technologies that make microgrid valuable for power systems. The most common microgrid architectures are then reviewed.

Keywords: Energy access, microgrid, multi-microgrid, distributed generation