  Microgrids represent an emerging paradigm of future electric power systems
that can utilize both distributed and centralized generations. Two recent
trends in microgrids are the integration of local renewable energy sources
(such as wind farms) and the use of co-generation (i.e., to supply both
electricity and heat). However, these trends also bring unprecedented
challenges to the design of intelligent control strategies for microgrids.
Traditional generation scheduling paradigms rely on perfect prediction of
future electricity supply and demand. They are no longer applicable to
microgrids with unpredictable renewable energy supply and with co-generation
(that needs to consider both electricity and heat demand). In this paper, we
study online algorithms for the microgrid generation scheduling problem with
intermittent renewable energy sources and co-generation, with the goal of
maximizing the cost-savings with local generation. Based on the insights from
the structure of the offline optimal solution, we propose a class of
competitive online algorithms, called CHASE (Competitive Heuristic Algorithm
for Scheduling Energy-generation), that track the offline optimal in an online
fashion. Under typical settings, we show that CHASE achieves the best
competitive ratio among all deterministic online algorithms, and the ratio is
no larger than a small constant 3.
