Design and Control of a Standalone Microgrid System for Saint Martin’s Island in Bangladesh

A standalone Microgrid system, consists of renewable energy resources is one of the promising solutions to supply electricity to remote areas where power grid extension is difficult or impossible to reach. However, generation uncertainties associated with the renewable power generation deteriorate the quality of power. In this paper, a standalone microgrid system, consists of Photovoltaic (PV) resources and energy storage system (ESS) is proposed to supply continuous and quality power to the local people of the Saint Martin’s island in Bangladesh. This paper investigates the energy management between PV, ESS, and loads and explores a decentralized active power control scheme to maintain the DC-link voltage and track consumer-end voltage and frequency set-point target. A microgrid and associated controllers are modeled in Matlab/Simulink software and run a dynamic simulation to investigate the usefulness of the proposed control strategy. This work offers several advantages: 1) utilizes significant amounts of solar energy, 2) reduces uncertainties of renewable power generation, 3) provides smooth and fast voltage and frequency regulation without extra communication infrastructure, 4) decreases C
O
2 emission, and 5) supplies safe and affordable electricity in remote, rural areas and islands.