Distributed control method for Micro Combined Heat and Power system on logical token-ring model in real-time pricing

The interest on distributed generation has been increasing, especially due to technical development on generation systems that meet environmental and energy policy concerns. One of the most important distributed energy technologies is Micro Combined Heat and Power (Micro-CHP). It can reduce power loss and energy cost, and enhance service reliability in distribution systems. The control-by-price concept fits well with controlling distributed generation and demand, however, It is difficult to control all Micro-CHP as expected using only real-time-pricing. Centralized control methods, which communicate bidirectionally, timely, and heavily between the operator and each house, have the problem from the point of view of the traffic, however, we selected a decentralized control model which communicate between each house and the operator manages only total energy information. This work proposes a new decentralized control method to operate multi Micro-CHP totally by taking token-ring with houses. Multi houses make a group, and coordinate their total generation by themselves, then solve imbalance of supply and demand without the operator's indication to each house. In addition, to sustain fairness in the system, priority based scheduling algorithms which turn rights of generation as token are proposed. By computer simulation, it is shown that the proposed method can reduce over 90 % the disposal energy and 40 % the total energy costs at most while sustaining fairness. Thus, the proposed method use effectively the generation of Micro-CUP according to the spread of distributed generation.