Day-ahead active and reactive power scheduling of wind turbines and battery energy storage systems for power loss and CO2 emission reduction in AC microgrids.

This paper proposes a day-ahead scheduling framework to analyze and optimize the impact of the coordinated active and reactive power management of wind turbines (WTs) and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) on the energy losses and CO2 emissions of AC microgrids (MGs). Within this framework, the BESS plays a central role by absorbing surplus renewable generation, mitigating curtailment, supporting voltage regulation, and ensuring a stable and reliable dispatch over a 24-hour horizon. A population-based genetic algorithm (PGA) is proposed as the main solution methodology, while particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the multiverse optimizer (MVO) are employed as benchmark methods for comparison. To ensure a fair assessment, all optimization techniques are implemented under the same parallel processing scheme, using the same decision-variable encoding, feasibility correction procedure, and hourly sequential AC power-flow method. The objective is to minimize network energy losses and CO2 emissions under both grid-connected and islanded operating modes. The proposed methodology is validated on 33-node and 69-node MGs, both evaluated under variable demand and wind-generation scenarios to capture the uncertainty and temporal variability associated with renewable production and load behavior. In addition, the BESS model includes charging/discharging efficiency, self-discharge effects, and battery lifetime assessment under the proposed operating scenarios, allowing a more realistic representation of storage performance. The optimization methods are evaluated over 100 independent runs using the best solution, average solution, standard deviation, and computational time as performance indicators. The results show that the proposed PGA provides the most robust and repeatable performance, while also highlighting the operational contribution of the BESS, reducing renewable curtailment, and guaranteeing compliance with all technical constraints, under deterministic baseline operation and under uncertain time-varying operating conditions in both test systems.