Power Flow Management of a Solar PV and Battery Powered Telecom Load with Bidirectional Grid Power Exchange

Abstract

Solar photovoltaic arrays are connected in series/parallel to increase the output power rating, but are desired to have lower voltage rating due to safety issues and the complexity associated with maximum power tracking of series connected cells. Because of the intermittent characteristics of PV power output, battery energy storage systems are also widely used along with solar PV to ensure the reliability. In this paper, a power flow management algorithm is presented along with a new fourport converter, for grid integration of solar PV and battery powered telecom load, operated at a lower voltage. The efficiency of system is high, as the number of power conversion stages are reduced in the fourport converter. The capacity of the battery energy storage system is reduced as grid power is available as back up to support the load. Also, the high voltage terminals of the converter is facilitating grid integration with the help of a H- Bridge inverter. The performance of power flow management control along with the converter is verified by extensive simulation studies using MATLAB software. A hardware prototype is developed in the laboratory and the performance of the system is validated. © 2021 IEEE.