Design of an optimized battery energy storage enabled Solar PV Pump for rural irrigation

Performance of Solar Photovoltaic (PV) system suffers from intermittency due to variable weather conditions and thus it faces challenges to penetrate into the electricity network. To mitigate this difficulty and power fluctuations at the load end, a possible solution could be the integration of battery energy storage with PV system. The Storage system can potentially improve security, quality, reliability and availability of electricity supply from Solar PV power system. The Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRFB) [1] is promising energy storage for reliability, scalability and deep discharge capacity. This paper presents an optimized power management scheme for solar PV power driven DC pump with energy storage for rural irrigation. The integrated PV system will supply power to the required demand of the 2 HP DC pump and excess power will charge the battery via a suitable DC-DC boost Converter [2]. During PV Power generation deficiency, the battery will be in discharging mode to supply the required power to drive the pump depending on its State of Charge (SOC) [3] and thus smoothens the transient power during that period. The PV output power is enhanced by implementing Perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT algorithm [4–5] under a set of practical insolation data. A 6kWh, 39 cells VRB storage [6] system has been modeled in MATLAB/ Simulink environment and the charge-discharge algorithm is decided based on real time VRFB State of Charge (SOC) prediction and Solar PV generation. A comparative analysis has also been done on Pump performance parameters with and without VRFB storage.