Supervisory Control of Standalone Wind/Solar Energy Generation Systems

The use of renewable energy technology to meet the energy demands has been increasing for the past few years. However, the important drawbacks associated with renewable energy systems are their inability to guarantee reliability and their intermittent nature. At present, standalone solar photovoltaic energy system cannot provide reliable power during night time or non-sunny days. The standalone wind system cannot satisfy constant load demands due to fluctuations in the magnitude of wind speeds from hour to hour throughout the year. This work focuses on the development of a supervisory model predictive control method for the optimal management and operation of hybrid standalone wind-solar energy generation systems. The proposed method is to design the supervisory control system via model predictive control which computes the power references for the wind and solar subsystems. The power references are sent to two local controllers which drive the two subsystems to the requested power references. The system is modeled in MATLAB SIMULINK and simulation results show that maximum power generated from hybrid system at varying environmental conditions.