An improved control method of battery energy storage system for hourly dispatch of photovoltaic power sources

• Control of BES for smoothing and hourly dispatch of a PV farm output is developed.
• Optimal control strategy for SOC and size of BES are evaluated using GA.
• Effectiveness of the control system has been investigated for the case of Malaysia.
• The proposed optimal SOC feedback controller has been found effective.
• Payback calculations of BES investment is given to highlight the economic benefits.

The effects of intermittent cloud and changes in temperature cause a randomly fluctuated output of a photovoltaic (PV) system. To mitigate the PV system impacts particularly on a weak electricity network, battery energy storage (BES) system is an effective means to smooth out the power fluctuations. Consequently, the net power injected to the electricity grid by PV and BES (PV/BES) systems can be dispatched smoothly such as on an hourly basis. This paper presents an improved control strategy for a grid-connected hybrid PV/BES systems for mitigating PV farm output power fluctuations. A feedback controller for BES state of charge is proposed, where the control parameters are optimized using genetic algorithm (GA). GA-based multi objective optimization utilizes the daily average PV farm output power profile which was obtained from simulation using the historical PV system input data of Malaysia. In this way, the optimal size for the BES is also determined to hourly dispatch a 1.2 MW PV farm. A case study for Malaysia is carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme using PSCAD/EMTDC software package. Furthermore, the validation of results of the proposed controller and BES size on the actual PV system output data are also given. Finally, a simple payback calculation is presented to study the economical aspects of the BES investment on the proposed mitigation strategy under Malaysian Feed-in Tariff program.