Voltage Control and Energy Management of Solar PV fed Stand-alone Low Voltage DC Microgrid for Rural Electrification

Microgrids (MG) are found to be the sound alter-natives for solving challenges posed by the conventional grid and conventional fuel based generation. As a paradigm shift Low Voltage DC Microgrids are emerging alternatives in rural electrification. As a part of this work, a standalone DC microgrid is considered consisting of a Solar PV, a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) and loads interfaced together to a DC bus. The loads considered here are DC Homes of three categories designed based on the energy consumption levels and socio-economic factors of rural population. The PV power suffers the problem of intermittency due to the environmental factors such as insolation, temperature, etc. As a part of this work a practical non uniform insolation data of 24 hours collected at IIT Bhubaneswar campus is considered. Correspondingly a loading pattern is also designed for all the houses in view of real life energy consumption pattern in rural areas. In the context of variable nature in the source and load, a controller is designed to achieve the primary objective of maintaining constant DC bus voltage of 48V. Also, a proper energy management is designed to achieve the secondary objective of power balance in the system. Corresponding analysis of the system and results are obtained using simulations in MATLAB/SIMULINK platform.