Solar photovoltaic output smoothing: Using battery energy storage system

Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is widely being implemented along with Solar PV to mitigate the inherent intermittencies of solar power. Solar smoothing is one such application of BESS. In this paper, different techniques for solar power smoothing is compared. An energy compensation based smoothing technique is proposed in this paper. The smoothing method not only ensures an optimal sizing of the battery but also keeps the state of charge of the battery same at the beginning and end of any random day. The different techniques are simulated on a typical moving cloud day output of a 5 MWp solar power-plant.