A Coordinated Control Method for Leveling PV Output Power Fluctuations of PV–Diesel Hybrid Systems Connected to Isolated Power Utility

Abstract

A photovoltaic (PV) system's power output is not constant and fluctuates depending on weather conditions. Fluctuating power causes frequency deviations and reduction in reliability of the isolated power utility or microgrid when large output power from several PV systems is penetrated in the utility. In this paper, to overcome these problems, a simple coordinated control method for leveling the fluctuations of combined power output from multiple PV systems is proposed. The conflicting objective of output power leveling and acquisition power increase is achieved by means of the proposed method. Here, output power command is generated in two steps: central and local. Fuzzy reasoning is used to generate the central leveling output power command considering insolation, variance of insolation, and absolute average of frequency deviation. In local step, a simple coordination is maintained between central power command and local power commands by producing a common tuning factor. Power converters are used to achieve the same output power as local command power employing PI control law for each of the PV generation systems. The proposed method is compared with the method where a modified maximum power point tracking control is used for smoothing the short-term change in each of the PV system's output. Simulation results show that the proposed method is effective for leveling output power fluctuations and feasible to reduce the frequency deviations of the isolated power utility to maintain reliability.