Abstract
This article aims to develop a smart isolated energy community (EC) by coupling the neighbouring rural community microgrids (CMGs) with enhanced droop control for efficient power sharing. This recommended solution employs a power management (PM) based droop-control to enable independent neighbouring CMGs to share power on an available basis by not constraining CMG inverters to equal power sharing. During the grid-connected mode, the droop control may have different power setpoints of each CMG. However, during the standalone mode of operation, the power setpoint should be defined according to their power rating and availability to maintain the system stability. In this article, a PM strategy is developed to maintain the power setpoints of the autonomous CMGs. An improper selection of power setpoints in autonomous CMG can raise the DC link voltage to an unmanageable value and can cause an inadvertent shutdown of CMG. The suggested PM-based droop control enables the CMG inverter not to restrict the inverter to equal power share but to distribute its active power as available in an asymmetric way, if required. The dynamic performance of the proposed coupled system incorporated with two remote isolated CMGs is investigated in a MATLAB environment. Further, a laboratory prototype of the proposed system has been developed using a LabVIEW-based sbRIO controller to verify the efficacy of the proposed approach.