Solar PV fed standalone DC microgrid with hybrid energy storage system

With the increased utilization of renewable energy (RE) in the power sector, microgrid technology is developing rapidly. In this paper an isolated DC microgrid is simulated with solar photovoltaic (PV) as the RE source to provide power to resistive DC loads along with a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) of Battery and Supercapacitor bank. Various cases of load and solar insolation variation are simulated to validate the proposed power management strategy for DC bus voltage regulation. System performance is compared with and without the SC bank and desirable reduction in transient voltage magnitude is observed when the HESS is used. A case using real insolation data from a solar PV plant at IIT Kharagpur is also simulated to analyse the system performance considering a constant load demand. It is observed that HESS helps to reduce DC bus voltage transients very effectively in all the situations. Very large transients arising due to sudden changes in load demand or PV generation is also compensated by the HESS.