Abstract

This paper presents an energy-water management system for coordinating multiple energy-water microgrids connected to the main electrical grid, a drinking water network, and access to groundwater from an aquifer. The structure of the proposed energy-water management system is a two-level hierarchical control system composed of local-level controllers for each microgrid and a supervisor-level controller for multiple microgrids. At the supervisor level, a novel model that describes multiple interconnected energy-water microgrids is proposed, which includes the information of electrical demand, renewable generation, and water consumption predicted by fuzzy models, the known dynamics of the different electric and water components from previous works, and a new capability of bidirectional sharing of the local water resource among the microgrids. Thanks to the inclusion of this bidirectional water sharing feature, the proposed control strategy can be used to manage and coordinate multiple energy-water microgrids, considering a sustainable use of the shared aquifer. A simulation for three interconnected energy-water microgrids is carried out to validate these proposals, comparing its results with a scenario where each microgrid is operated locally without coordination. The results show that the proposed coordinated controller achieves a sustainable use of groundwater and promotes cooperation between microgrids, decreasing groundwater use by 5.69% with respect to the case without coordination.