Reactive Power Control with an Energy Management System in Single Phase AC Microgrids

This paper presents a novel control strategy to achieve unity power factor with an energy management system (EMS) in an AC microgrid. The digitally controlled, power electronics based EMS controls the microgrid in both grid connected and islanding mode by making sure that energy is harvested from distributed resources, stored in batteries, and available at all times for critical loads. In this paper a new EMS prototype is presented which offers reactive power compensation as an auxiliary service. Modeling and simulations are presented and verified experimentally on a laboratory prototype.