Abstract

Abstract
The activities of the electricity sector in production and consumption have implications in almost all environmental problems of today. The main environmental impacts occur during the production of electricity, mainly due to the emission of air pollutants, which is directly linked to climate change that has been observed over time. Ambitious climate change mitigation requires significant changes in many economic sectors, in particular in the production and consumption of energy. Considering that the primary energy consumption has increased, doubling since the 1970s, and in particular the consumption of electricity has had a sharper increase, nearly quadrupling in the same period, all measures that can mitigate environmental impacts on both the supply and demand sides of electricity are of interest. This paper introduces a new software application that analyses efficient investment in street lighting and industrial and domestic electrical equipment, accounting for the reduction of losses in the conductors of electrical installations, which is usually neglected. It also determines the reduction of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, which contributes to the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases from a country or particular product.

Abstract
This paper provides a new approach in decision making process for shunt capacitor placement in distribution networks. The main core of the evaluation process is a multi-objective framework to allocate the capacitor banks. The power loss and the total harmonic distortion (THD) are the objective functions of the system under study in a long-term planning horizon. In order to select the executive plan introduced by using a multi-objective model, transient switching overvoltages have been considered. As the size and location of shunt capacitors may result in unacceptable overvoltages, the proposed technical decision making framework can be applied to avoid corresponding damages. In this paper, an iterative conventional power flow technique is introduced. This technique can be applied to evaluate THD for distribution networks as well as other power flow based objectives, such as power losses calculation and voltage stability assessment. The presented framework is a two stage one where at the first stage, a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) augmented with a local search technique is used in order to solve the addressed multi-objective optimization problem. Then, at the second stage, a decision making support technique is applied to determine the best solution from the obtained Pareto front. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, two benchmarks are addressed in this paper. The first test system is a 9-bus distribution network and the second one is an 85-bus large scale distribution network. The simulation results show that the presented method is satisfactory and consistent with the expectation.

Abstract
This paper presents a new stochastic multi-layer agent-based model to study the behavior of electricity market participants. The wholesale market players including renewable power producers are modeled in the first layer of the proposed multi-agent environment. The players optimize bidding/offering strategies to participate in the electricity markets. In the second layer, responsive customers including plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners and consumers who participate in demand response (DR) programs are modeled as independent agents. The objective of the responsive customers is to increase their benefit while retaining welfare. The interaction between market players in day-ahead and real-time markets is modeled using an incomplete information game theory algorithm. Due to the uncertainties of resources and customers' behavior, the model is developed using a stochastic framework. A case study containing wind power producers (WPPs), PEV aggregators and retailers providing DR is considered to demonstrate the usefulness and proficiency of the proposed multi-layer agent-based model.

Abstract
The hybrid microgrids (MGs) are introduced to form the future distribution systems that utilize the advantages of both DC and AC grids. In the hybrid MG, renewables, DC and AC loads, storage devices and distributed energy resources (DERs) are integrated and connected through the separated AC and DC buses. The control and management of the hybrid MG are more complicated than an individual AC or DC microgrid. In this paper, first, the two control strategies are implemented in a typical hybrid MG. Then, the performance of these control strategies in the view of the primary control are discussed and compared in response to the occurrence of a defined contingency. Simulation results show the different performance of each control strategy in frequency and voltage control of the hybrid MG in response to the same contingency.

Abstract
' Renewable energy sources are normally connected to the power grid via power electronic converters. High penetration of these energy sources into the power grid leads to high instability in voltage and frequency. This issue is caused by neglecting the inherent characteristics of synchronous generators i.e., inertia, damping and proper active and reactive power sharing in the structure of the used control technique in the control loop of the interfaced converter between power grid and renewable energy sources. This paper presents a power-based control technique based on a double synchronous controller (DSC) for interfaced converter between the renewable energy sources and the power grid, including an active-reactive power based dynamic equation. Through the proposed DSC, a decoupled control method is performed in which both active and reactive power can be injected from renewable energy sources into the power grid by the interfaced power converter with the inherent features of synchronous power generators. By using the proposed control technique, a stable operation of the power grid can be guaranteed during the integration of large-scale renewable energy sources. Stringent simulation results performed in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment verify the proficiency of the proposed control technique.