  Inserting renewable energy in the electric grid in a decentralized manneris a
key challenge of the energy transition. However, at local scale, both
production and demand display erratic behavior, which makes it delicate to
match them. It is the goal of Energy Management Systems (EMS) to achieve such
balance at least cost. We present EMSx, a numerical benchmark for testing
control algorithms for the management of electric microgrids equipped with a
photovoltaic unit and an energy storage system. EMSx is made of three key
components: the EMSx dataset, provided by Schneider Electric, contains a
diverse pool of realistic microgrids with a rich collection of historical
observations and forecasts; the EMSx mathematical framework is an explicit
description of the assessment of electric microgrid control techniques and
algorithms; the EMSx software EMSx.jl is a package, implemented in the Julia
language, which enables to easily implement a microgrid controller and to test
it. All components of the benchmark are publicly available, so that other
researchers willing to test controllers on EMSx may reproduce experiments
easily. Eventually, we showcase the results of standard microgrid control
methods, including Model Predictive Control, Open Loop Feedback Control and
Stochastic Dynamic Programming.
