Adaptive Power Management Strategy for Effective Volt–Ampere Utilization of a Photovoltaic Generation Unit in Standalone Microgrids

Abstract

This paper proposes an adaptive power management strategy for photovoltaic (PV) generation units in a standalone microgrid. In existing microgrid configurations, the PV units are controlled using droop control technique, which ensures load sharing among the distributed generation (DG) inverters. However, the intermittency in power generation of PV-based DG poses many challenges to the standalone operation of a microgrid, the ineffective volt-ampere (VA) utilization being one among them. This paper proposes an adaptive droop control, which enables the maximum utilization of the VA rating of the interfacing inverter in a PV/battery hybrid system. With the proposed technique, as the generation goes down, the DG inverter is controlled to support the reactive power demand of the load, thereby utilizing the rating of the inverter switches effectively. The applicability of the proposed adaptive control method is analyzed using detailed simulation and real-time hardware-in-loop studies.