It is essential to secure energy sources by installing a private power generator for business continuity in case of a power outage caused by natural disasters. The authors have developed an optimization tool to estimate the optimal amount of distributed power supply equipment using economic efficiency and resilience as two evaluation indicators. In estimating the economics, this tool has performed calculations with the constraint of meeting hourly demand at minimum cost. This approach is consistent with deciding on installing equipment in a building by considering the initial cost and running cost over the equipment's service life.However, we came to believe that this method is problematic from the perspective of practical energy management. In other words, it is questionable whether the private generator in the hospital building can generate electricity to meet the demand in case of a power failure because demand (load) has short cycle fluctuations of the order of seconds, and the private generator must respond to these fluctuations from time to time in the case of stand-alone operation. The optimization tools we have developed in the past have not considered the balance between power output and load demand (demand sufficiency). If the output fails to respond adequately to the load, this leads the generator disassembled. Here, we defined demand sufficiency as satisfying the demand so that the output of the generator is within the rated value while keeping the frequency fluctuation always caused by the power difference between supply and demand within an acceptable value.Therefore, this paper proposes a new optimization method considering the balance of power supply and demand in private generators' independent operation during power outages. Specifically, we used a power system simulator is to obtain the constraints for satisfying the demand sufficiency, and we added the constraints to the optimization as demand sufficiency conditions. We also compare the case study results by applying these constraints to the results of previous case studies. The comparison of the case studies shows that the addition of demand-sufficiency conditions changed the capacities of private generators installed, which suggests that the proposed method has a specific effect in proposing a realistic private generator configuration.

Optimization of the Capacities of Private Generators Installed in a Hospital Building Under the Constraint of Demand Sufficiency During Power Outages

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/POWER/POWER2021/volume/85109

ASME 2021 Power Conference (POWER2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.