Development of a PHIL Real-Time Simulation Testbed for Optimization of Hybrid Power Plant Generation

Future electrical grids will likely include a diverse group of power generation plants. With the growing list of new generation options comes many opportunities for more optimal energy production management and effective resource utilization. Microgrids are an ideal environment for research, development, and validation of those energy optimization strategies. This paper establishes a method for integrating a virtual thermal power plant model with a physical microgrid in a power hardware in the loop testbed. One advantage of these testbeds is their variety of configuration options. In this paper, the combined effects of photovoltaic and concentrating solar power generation are investigated. A conventional thermal power plant with components sized for CSP applications is modeled in the Simscape environment. Actual solar panels provide the photovoltaic element of this experiment. How the plant model and physical hardware interact is described in detail. A PV startup and shutdown event is simulated in real-time. The model responses are shown to be successfully and correctly coupled to electrical power flow in the testbed.