Intelligent DC microgrid with smart grid communications: Control strategy consideration and design

Aiming at photovoltaic (PV) - storage urban building integrated system, this paper proposes a DC microgrid with multi-layer control and smart grid communications. The paper focuses on power balancing, with load shedding and PV constrained production, and takes into account the grid availability and grid vulnerability by smart grid messages. The system behavior modeling by MATLAB Stateflow leads to the whole control strategy design, which concerns the power balancing and imposed power limits by the utility grid, while providing interface for energy management. Experimental results evaluate the feasibility of the proposed control strategy. As further development of this control design, an intelligent multi-layer supervision is suggested. This supervision, able to exchange data with the smart grid, deals with the end-user demand, forecast of photovoltaic production, prediction of load consumption, and energy management. The major technical contribution of this paper is linked to the proposed control design that permits better DC microgrid integration (avoids undesired injection, mitigates fluctuations in grid power, reduces grid peak consumption) and provides possibility to reduce the negative impact on the utility grid thanks to the supervision interface. The power balancing control interface provides possibility for advanced energy management through with low speed communication.