Hardware Design for Implementation of Energy Management in a Solar-Interfaced DC Microgrid

Abstract

The growing power requirement and the limited availability of fossil fuels makes it necessary to use renewable energy resources (RERs) as an alternative. The penetration of renewable sources in the existing power system becomes a big challenge for the safe and reliable operation of the system. Again, the erratic nature of these sources makes it impossible to supply constant power to the consumers. To overcome the intermittency of the environment and to provide constant reliable power to the loads, battery, fuel cell, and supercapacitor like storage devices are required in the system. Here, by considering the complementary characteristics of supercapacitors with high power density (500-5000W/L) and batteries with high energy density(50-80Wh/L), a combination of these two storage devices is used with renewable sources as a hybrid storage system. Hence, a proper power management scheme is necessary to control the power flow in the system and to balance the total power between generation and demand. In this paper, an energy management technique was proposed along with detailed modeling for the experimental setup of the DC microgrid (DCMG). A dSPACE 1103 controller was implemented in the hardware setup. The validation of the proposed energy management scheme and hardware design is done by using both simulation and experimental results.