CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE AND ENERGY-FLOW CONTROL MODEL FOR A HYBRID MICROGRID WITH CRITICAL AND NON-CRITICAL LOADS

Abstract

This study develops a conceptual architecture for a hybrid microgrid intended for energy-flow manage-ment under variable photovoltaic generation, limited energy storage, and possible utility-grid outages. The aim is to establish a consistent transition from the functional structure of the microgrid to a formalized simulation model in which critical and non-critical loads are directly linked to the power balance, energy-storage con-straints, dis-patch logic, and power-supply reliability indices. A modular hierarchical architecture is proposed, comprising pho-tovoltaic generation, energy storage, utility-grid interconnection, two load classes, an inter-nal power bus, and an energy management system. A discrete mathematical model is formulated that ac-counts for the active-power balance, storage state-of-charge dynamics, import/export limits, and a weighted objective function assigning the highest penalty to unserved critical demand. The model is struc-turally verified using synthetic 24-hour generation and demand profiles and a baseline 6-hour grid outage. For the same total energy deficit, priority control increased the critical-load supply ratio from 74.4 % to 97.6 % and reduced critical-load energy not supplied from 14.88 kWh to 1.42 kWh, i.e., by 90.5 %. An additional outage-duration sensitivity analysis showed critical-load supply ratios of 100.0 %, 97.6 %, and approximate-ly 85.8 % for 4-, 6-, and 7-hour outages, respectively, demonstrating that the quantitative benefit depends on outage duration while the priority-allocation mechanism remains unchanged. The results confirm that priority control does not remove the physical energy deficit but reallocates the limited resource toward criti-cal consumers. The proposed structure can be implemented in MATLAB/Simulink or another scenario-based simulation environment.