Abstract

The introduction of renewable energy resources into electrical systems and productive processes is a unique opportunity for the sustainable development of communities. Productive processes that use solar energy or PSPs have been conceived to improve the quality of life of rural communities in the Arica & Parinacota region in northern Chile. In this context, this work presents a novel approach for the incorporation of productive solar solutions into Microgrid Energy Management Systems (MG-EMS). EMS minimizes overall operational costs by means of coordinating MGs and PSPs. Therefore, there is a great opportunity in the inclusion of PSPs in EMS and taking advantage of its benefits. The proposal incorporates the field experience of the research team regarding solar energy solutions for rural communities in the north of Chile. In this study, multi-zone time variant PSPs load models are developed based on the ZIP load model approach. The multi-zone ZIP load model performance is analyzed and compared with a persistence method. The results show the benefits of using more accurate models to capture the particular behavior of productive solar processes compared with a conventional approach. The mean absolute percentage error for multi-zone ZIP (9.99 %) is lower than that of the persistence method (20.41 %) compared with the active power load measured, resulting in the prevalence of the multizone ZIP load model. The improvement of MG-EMS performance will also benefit the power system operation and planning.