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Algorithm to Control Power Production from Solar Panels

Conference Paper · May 2017

DOI: 10.1145/3077839.3081672

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Kumar Saurav Sambaran Bandyopadhyay

Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies Indian Institute of Science
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IBM Research IBM
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 Algorithm to Control Power Production from Solar Panels

Kumar Saurav, Sambaran Bandyopadhyay, Pratyush Kumar, Vijay Arya

IBM Reseach
{kr.saurav.010, sambband, pratyush.kumar, vijay.arya} @in.ibm.com

ABSTRACT ally zero maintenance costs. However, despite its simplicity

With the cost of renewable energy sources like photo-voltaic it has its own sets of challenges. Power generation from
solar progressively declining, it is expected that contribution solar follows the daily irradiance profile which results in a
from these sources in overall power generation will increase. mismatch of demand and supply of energy. A lot of surplus
However, these newer sources have their own set of draw- power generation during middle of the day when the demand
backs. First and foremost is the variability in generation, may not be that high and little energy is produced in the
then, controlling the power output from solar is also not mornings and evenings when the demand is highest. Fur-
trivial. Furthermore, there is a mismatch between the de- ther, no power is produced during the night. Consequently,
mand profile from the consumer and the supply profile of this may result in back flow of the power from prosumer to-
renewable generation. wards the conventional production source. Our power trans-
This increased penetration of renewable sources may lead mission grids may not be compatible for this reverse power
to grid related problems such as over voltage, power back flow and may results in over voltage and instability.
flow and instability. In this paper we propose a curtailment The problem of mismatch between demand and supply
based solution to ameliorate the problem of over production. from solar energy is well known in literature. Several differ-
We provide an algorithm which controls the power output ent methods have been proposed to mitigate this mismatch
from solar panels. When demand is less than the maximum and also to address the issue of variability in generation.
production capacity of the panels, the algorithm curtails the One commonly proposed approach is to store the excess en-
output to match the demand. And when demand is more, ergy in battery banks [3], [4] and [5]. While batteries will
the algorithm does a best effort to produce maximum pos- definitely reduce the wastage of energy, they are extremely
sible power. expensive solution especially for multi-mega-watt installa-
tions. Further, batteries have a running cost and need to be
replaced every few years. Also, we still need to account for
1. INTRODUCTION & RELATED WORK the cases when the batteries are fully charged. In that case,
Cost of energy production from renewable sources such the problem is only partially solved.
as solar and wind is progressively declining. This declin- Another problem in integration of large scale solar into the
ing prices and strong encouragement from the government power grid is that it may led to back flow of power. To ad-
in the form of investments and subsidies has resulted in ag- dress this, authors have proposed to cutoff some prosumers
gressive increase in the overall deployment of these new en- from the grid [6] and [7]. This approach will ensure that an
ergy sources. Many countries have set ambitious target for upper limit on the renewable intake is always met. However,
their share of energy coming from renewable sources. For this may result in reduced intake of renewable energy. Ad-
instance, Indian government targets to get 175 GW from ditionally, this approach is highly unfair to prosumers who
renewables by 2022 as compared to 46GW in 2016 which have been barred from feeding in.
approximately 300% increase in just 6 years [1]. On the Another approach to solve the problem of over produc-
similar lines, Germany wants 60% of total energy and 80% tion during the peak hours is to somehow reduce the power
of electrical energy from renewable sources by 2050 [2]. production/feed-in across the prosumers, i.e., to curtail all
A major fraction of the share of renewable energy will be the prosumers equally. This will ensure that upper limit on
generated from solar photo-voltaic (pv). Solar pv is quite renewable intake is never violated and it will not suffer from
simple and does not have any moving parts. It presents the fairness problem since every one will get an equal chance
an attractive market since after installation, there is virtu- to produce power. In this paper, we propose an algorithm
which controls the power output from solar panels. When
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or
demand is less than the maximum production capacity of
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed the panels, the algorithm curtails the output to match the
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- demand. And when demand is more, the algorithm does a
tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than best effort to produce maximum possible power.
ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re-
publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
e-Energy ’17, May 16–19, 2017, Shatin, Hong Kong 2. PROPOSED ALGORITHM & RESULTS

c 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-5036-5/17/05. . . $15.00 A charge controller is required to operate the solar pan-
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3077839.3081672 els at the optimal operating point which is typically the

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 150 150
Current & Power Power control region MPPT region Traditional MPPT Traditional MPPT

100 100

Power

Power
Current
Power
50 50
New Algo: P = 100 New Algo: P = 50 New Algo: P = 100 New Algo: P = 50
in in in in

0 0
0 4 8 12 16 20 0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8
Voltage Time Time
Figure 1: Left: I–V and P–V characteristics of a solar cell Center: Comparing the power output from both algorithm
under clear sky irradiance Right: Comparing the power output from both algorithm under non clear sky irradiance

voltage where the maxima occurs in power-voltage curve start

of the pv panels. The charge controller is programmed
with maximum-power-point-tracking (mppt) algorithms to Power Pin Traditional
control Read Pin MPPT
ensure that the panels are always operating near its peak algorithm algorithm
power production capability. However, this setup leads to
power production which is significantly higher than the ac-
Power mppt
tual demand around afternoon. To address this issue we Decide control mode
control
are proposing to replace the existing mppt algorithm with a
new algorithm which has the capability to control the power
output from solar panels. Figure 2: The proposed control algorithm
The proposed algorithm has several advantages as com- around the world have lead1 to increased share of solar pv
pared to the existing literature described in section 1. Firstly, in the energy market. Solar pv is a lucrative energy sources
since we are proposing a software based solution, there is no however it have its own limitations of variability and over
hardware requirements. Existing charge controllers already production during peak hours. In this paper, we have tried
have the mppt implemented in them and we just need a to address the problem of overproduction in solar pv by
firmware update to re-program the charge controller to im- proposing a new algorithm to replace the existing mppt con-
plement the proposed algorithm. Secondly, the closed loop trollers. Our simulation results shows that the algorithm
feedback control is generally robust to disturbances such as sets the voltage of the solar panels such that the power out-
changing solar irradiance or cloud cover. put matches the demand. For the times when the demand is
Figure 1(Left) shows the I-V and P-V characteristics of a more than the solar panel can generate, the algorithm does
typical solar panel. We divide this into two region, a) Power a best effort to produce maximum possible power. In future,
control mode and b) mppt mode. In power control region we plan to integrate this algorithm into a small scale grid
we implement a closed loop feedback control system to track to observe the response of the grid in presence of our power
the desired power and in mppt mode we do a best effort to control algorithm in contrast to a normal mppt controller.
produce maximum possible power. We are using a simple Next, we will physically implement this into a solar charge
proportional-integral (PI) controller for the power control controller and see the differences between the proposed algo-
mode and hill climbing for mppt mode. The choice of mode rithm and mppt controller in a real world implementation.
of operation is decided by the desired input power. This
algorithm is summarized briefly in Figure 2.
We now compare the simulation results obtained from our
4. REFERENCES
[1] MNRE, India. (2015, Mar) Tentative state wise
proposed algorithm against a traditional mppt implemen-
breakup of renewable power target.
tation. First, we take simple clear sky irradiance for our
mnre.gov.in/mission-and-vision-2/achievements/.
simulation. In Figure 1(Center ), the black curve shows the
power output from a typical mppt algorithm and the colored [2] The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy
lines are the power output for different desired outputs. For Berlin. (2015, Nov) The energy of the future: Fourth
the case where desired power is more than the production energy transition monitoring report.
capacity of solar panels, the new proposed algorithm delivers [3] Wang, Guishi et. al., “Power smoothing of large solar
the same power as the mppt thus doing a best effort to de- pv plant using hybrid energy storage,” IEEE
liver the required power demand. We can observe this best Transactions on Sustainable Energy, 2014.
effort during morning and during evening hours. Further, in [4] CV Nayar et.al, “A grid-interactive photovoltaic
the middle of the day, when panels can produce more than uninterruptible power supply system using battery
the desired value, the algorithm curtails the output to the storage and a back up diesel generator,” IEEE
desired value. Next, we added a high frequency noise and Transactions on Energy Conversion, vol. 15, 2000.
a low frequency disturbance over the clear sky irradiance to [5] Cody A Hill et. al, “Battery energy storage for enabling
simulate a more realistic solar profile. For this case also, integration of distributed solar power generation,”
when available power is more than desired, the algorithm IEEE Transactions on smart grid, vol. 3, 2012.
keeps the power output near the desired value and does a [6] S. Bandyopadhyay et. al, “Planning curtailment of
best effort in other case as illustrated in Figure 1(Right). renewable generation in power grids.” in ICAPS, 2016.
[7] S Rongali et. al, “iplug: Decentralised dispatch of
3. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK distributed generation,” in 8th International Conference
Declining costs and aggressive targets set by governments on Communication Systems and Networks, 2016.

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