Microgrid Optima: Contract-Aware Optimization and Operational Control of Microgrids with Energy Storage and Renewables

: Commercial and industrial microgrids increasingly deploy renewable generation and battery energy storage to reduce electricity costs, yet their economic performance is dominated by complex electricity contracts in which supply and distribution demand charges are governed by rolling peak-demand ratchets. Existing optimization approaches often rely on simplified tariff models, short horizons, or heuristic penalties, limiting their ability to capture long-term cost impacts and to support scalable decision making. This paper presents Microgrid Optima, a contract-aware optimization framework that couples billing-period peak-bound synthesis with interval-level operational control. At the billing-period level, we formulate an optimization model that computes optimal supply-demand and distribution-demand bounds for a monthly cycle by directly minimizing contract-defined demand charges. The model explicitly captures contract-specific peak rules, battery power and energy constraints, solar availability, and interval-level demand satisfaction, yielding physically feasible peak bounds that can be enforced without load shedding. At the operational level, we introduce a deterministic, interval-level control algorithm that enforces the optimized peak bounds in real time. Given predicted net demand, the applicable contract-specific bound, and the battery state, the controller computes closed-form battery charge or discharge actions at 15–30 minute resolution, resorting to load shedding only when storage limits are insufficient. By separating peak-bound optimization from high-resolution dispatch, Microgrid Op-tima enables scalable analysis over full billing periods while preserving operational realism. The resulting demand bounds provide compact, high-fidelity summaries of microgrid flexibility that integrate naturally with long-horizon planning and decision guidance under real commercial electricity tariffs.