Abstract Controlling of a standalone wind dominated system under variable load conditions and fluctuating wind is a challenging task. Energy storage systems (ESSs) can play a significant role in stabilizing voltage of such systems. In this paper, a nonlinear controller is designed for a remote area power supply (RAPS) system consisting of the wind turbine based on a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG), a battery supercapacitor hybrid energy storage system (HESS) and variable local load connected to the DC bus. An adaptive sliding mode controller (SMC) as a nonlinear control method is designed to improve the stability and the performance of such standalone systems under high perturbations. Moreover, the battery and supercapacitor performances are modified by embedding a filter in the adaptive SMC and proportional–integral (PI) controller. Also, a robust fuzzy logic controller (FLC) is implemented to the power generation system to track the maximum power point from the wind. The simulation results of the system with adaptive SMC reveal the superiority of the proposed controller compared with PI in the three different ESS schemes.