A Novel Adaptive Power Smoothing Approach for PV Power Plant with Hybrid Energy Storage System

Clouds passing over solar photovoltaic (PV) power system causes power fluctuations, which contributes to power quality issues. Power fluctuations are usually compensated by an energy storage system (ESS) integrated with a filtering or smoothing controller. However, there is a great burden to tune and determine the filtering time constant (TF) that leads to better alleviation of PV power fluctuations because the irradiance variability varies from day to day. Lack of cloud information leads to incorrect selection of TF values which leads to poor smoothing performance when setting low values on cloudy days, or to unnecessary ESS operation when setting high values on clear days. This paper introduces a novel power smoothing framework to avoid the arbitrary selection of TF values and reduce the stress on ESS based on predictive and adaptive smoothing mechanisms. The proposed controller contains two layers, the first layer predicts the next day's irradiance profile and uses a clear sky model to identify the cloud class. Next, the controller sets the initial values of the filter time constants for cloudy, moderate, and mild days, and disables smoothing on clear and overcast days. The second layer adaptively adjusts the initial filter time constant based on the current power ramp rate and shares power for a hybrid energy storage system (HESS). The performance of the proposed controller is tested against the forecasting errors and compared to fixed time constant-based smoothing techniques and ramp rate control in a range of scenarios, including smoothing, ramp rate reduction, and battery degradation assessment.