Design and Field Implementation of a Hierarchical Control Solution for Residential Energy Storage Systems

This paper presents an innovative approach to the design and real-life field implementation of a hierarchical control solution for a residential ESS (energy storage system) for consumers/prosumers. The proposed control solution minimises residential prosumers’ electricity bill. It consists of an offline controller (secondary level) implemented in the cloud, which works in total synergy with a local real-time controller (primary level) at the ESS. The offline controller proposes an optimal day-ahead energy management strategy using the forecasted demand and PV generation; whereas the local real-time controller is responsible for the management strategy in the best suitable way while dealing with the system real-time constraints and forecast uncertainties. Distributed implementation and demonstration of the solution have been performed through a cloud control platform, operated by an aggregator. Moreover, an offline analysis has been carried out to assess the performances of the real-life implementation outputs and verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The obtained results show promising performances of the overall system and implementation approach. This will further ease the integration process of consumer/prosumer with the future virtual power plant or local electricity market operator. The main concept has been developed to be implemented within the StoreNet pilot project platform.