Energy Management Strategy for Rural Communities’ DC Micro Grid Power System Structure with Maximum Penetration of Renewable Energy Sources

• Main Authors: Maheswaran Gunasekaran, Hidayathullah Mohamed Ismail, Bharatiraja Chokkalingam, Lucian Mihet-Popa, Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-04-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: energy management strategy (EMS); distributed generator (DG); state of charge (SoC); circuit breaker (CB); standard test condition (STC); photovoltaic (PV)
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/4/585

The AC and DC power system structures need to be modernized to meet consumer demands. DC microgrids are suitably admired due to their high efficiency, consistency, reliability, and load sharing performance, when interconnected to DC renewable and storage sources. The main control objective for any DC microgrid is providing proper load–power balancing based on the Distributed Generator (DG) sources. Due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, batteries play an important role in load–power balancing in a DC microgrid. The existing energy management strategy may be able to meet the load demand. However, that technique is not suitable forrural communities’ power system structure. This research offers an energy management strategy (EMS) for a DC microgrid to supply power to rural communities with solar, wind, fuel cell, and batteries as input sources. The proposed EMS performs the load–power balancing between each source (renewable and storage) in a DC microgrid for dynamic load variation. Here, the EMS handles two battery sources (one is used to deliver power to the priority load, and the other is utilized in the common DC bus) to meet the required demand. The proposed EMS is capable of handling load–power balancing using renewable energy sources with less consumption of non- conventional energy sources (such as a diesel generator). The performance of the system is analyzed based on different operating conditions of the input sources. The MATLAB/Simulink simulation model for the proposed DC microgrid with their EMS control system is developed and investigated, and their results are tabulated under different input and load conditions. The proposed EMS is verified through a laboratory real-time DC microgrid experimental setup, and the results are discussed.