An Energy Storage System Composed of Photovoltaic Arrays and Batteries with Uniform Charge/Discharge

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to develop a photovoltaic module array (PVMA) and an energy storage system (ESS) with charging and discharging control for batteries to apply in grid power supply regulation of high proportions of renewable energy. To control the flow of energy at the DC load and charge/discharge the battery uniformly, this work adapted a bidirectional buck–boost soft-switching converter and the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique of the photovoltaic module array. First, a boost converter is used with the perturb and observe (P&O) method, so that the photovoltaic module array can work at the maximum power point (MPP) at any time. When the output power of the photovoltaic module array is greater than the load power, the excess power is used to charge the battery; on the contrary, if the output power of the photovoltaic module array is lower than the load power, the battery discharges for auxiliary power supply. This makes the voltage of the DC link maintain a constant value. The monitoring circuit sends the voltage and current signals to the TMS320F2809 digital signal processor (DSP) produced by Texas Instruments to control the battery charging/discharging voltage and current. The photovoltaic module array works at the MPP to improve the performance of the overall energy storage system. Finally, the actual test result shows that the soft-switching converter used in this work, when compared to the hard-switching converter, can improve efficiency by nearly 4% when the load power is above 125 W. When the photovoltaic power generation system operation is between 150 W and 400 W, the proposed uniform charging and discharging architecture can rapidly reach uniformity.