Energy Storage Technologies for Smoothing Power Fluctuations in Marine Current Turbines

With regard to marine renewable energies, significant electrical power can be extracted from marine tidal current. However, the power harnessed by a marine current turbine varies due to the periodicity of the tidal phenomenon and could be highly fluctuant caused by swell effect. To improve the power quality and make the marine current generation system more reliable, energy storage systems will play a crucial role. In this paper, the power fluctuation phenomenon is described and the state of art of energy storage technologies is presented. Characteristics of various energy storage technologies are analyzed and compared for marine application. The omparison shows that high-energy batteries like sodiumsulphur battery and flow battery are favorable for smoothing the long-period power fluctuation due to the tide phenomenon while supercapacitors and flywheels are suitable for eliminating short-period power disturbances due to swell or turbulence phenomena. It means that hybrid storage technologies are needed for achieving optimal performance in marine current energy systems

Development of a Control Strategy for the Hybrid Energy Storage Systems in Standalone Microgrid

The intermediate energy storage system is very necessary for the standalone multi-source renewable energy system to increase stability, reliability of supply, and power quality. Among the most practical energy storage solutions is combining supercapacitors and chemical batteries. However, the major problem in this kind of application is the design of the power management, as well as the control scheme of hybrid energy storage systems. The focal purpose of this paper is to develop a novel approach to control DC bus voltage based on the reference power\u27s frequency decomposition. This paper uses a storage system combined of batteries and supercapacitors. These later are integrated in the multi-source renewable energy system to supply an AC load. This technique uses the low-pass filters\u27 properties to control the DC bus voltage by balancing the generated green power and the fluctuating load. The hybrid storage system regulates power fluctuations by absorbing surplus power and providing required power. The results show good performances of the proposed control scheme, such as low battery current charge/discharge rates, lower current stress level on batteries, voltage control improvements, which lead to increase the battery life

Hourly Dispatching Wind-Solar Hybrid Power System with Battery-Supercapacitor Hybrid Energy Storage

This dissertation demonstrates a dispatching scheme of wind-solar hybrid power system (WSHPS) for a specific dispatching horizon for an entire day utilizing a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) configured by batteries and supercapacitors. Here, wind speed and solar irradiance are predicted one hour ahead of time using a multilayer perceptron Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which exhibits satisfactory performance with good convergence mapping between input and target output data. Furthermore, multiple state of charge (SOC) controllers as a function of energy storage system (ESS) SOC are developed to accurately estimate the grid reference power (PGrid,ref) for each dispatching period. A low pass filter (LPF) is employed to decouple the power between a battery and a supercapacitor (SC), and the cost optimization of the HESS is computed based on the time constant of the LPF through extensive simulations. Besides, the optimum value of depth of discharge for ESS considering both cycling and calendar expenses has been investigated to optimize the life cycle cost of the ESS, which is vital for minimizing the cost of a dispatchable wind-solar power scheme. Finally, the proposed ESS control algorithm is verified by conducting control hardware-in-the loop (CHIL) experiments in a real-time digital simulator (RTDS) platform

Techno-economic analysis of storage degradation effect on levelised cost of hybrid energy storage systems

Abstract: The inclusion of storage systems in renewable-based energy systems is a promising option to boost the reliability of power supply for offgrid communities. A major consideration is the cost and performance of the selected storage system. This study investigates different energy storage combinations to form a hybrid energy storage system (HESS). The goal is to exploit the complementary characteristics of each storage system. The effects of system degradation on energy output and replacement costs over a 20-year period are analysed and used in obtaining the Levelised Cost of Hybrid Energy Storage Systems (LCOHESS); which can be used as a basis for comparing the techno-economic benefits of different HESS configurations. The model is run with data for a community in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa, to show the best HESS option that could be deployed by rural electrification planners and investors, based on the value of LCOHESS obtained

Analysis of the properties of supercapacitors and possible applications for the technology

Supercapacitors have a lot of excellent qualities that would make them a great substitute for batteries when it comes to electrical energy storage systems. Supercapacitors can discharge and charge very rapidly, they have a lifespan in the realm of millions of cycles, and they are much more efficient than batteries. Unfortunately, they cannot hold nearly as much charge as batteries. This paper seeks to further investigate the properties of supercapacitor technology and the best way to exploit these properties with the purpose of integrating them into renewable energy systems. There is currently a lot of research occurring around the world with supercapacitors. This research mostly revolves around improving advanced carbon materials that will allow supercapacitors to have an even higher capacitance so that may begin to truly compete with batteries. Other research is looking to incorporate supercapacitors into renewable systems. This ranges from wind generation systems to solar energy systems to even hybrid battery/supercapacitor storage systems. Undertaking my own experiments, I sought to better understand the properties of supercapacitors by comparing them to standard batteries and by constructing a hybrid energy system that utilizes supercapacitors in tandem with batteries. Over the course of this research, it was determined that, while supercapacitors certainly have very unique and advantageous properties, with their current limits they would best be used in tandem with a battery. However, a hybrid system is possible and supercapacitors can charge a battery, which greatly increases the voltage range that a battery can be charged with. The system constructed contained six 10 F supercapacitors wired in series to a 12 V 20 A battery. The supercapacitor bank was able to charge the battery up to 0.009% of its full charge with one cycle. While this seems to be an insignificant percentage, it demonstrates that a hybrid system would be effective, and scaling up the supercapacitor bank would yield better results. In the future, it would be worthwhile to create a more sophisticated circuit to test this system outside with a real wind turbine. Through future testing, it will be determined how much more efficient it is to capture wind energy with a hybrid system compared to a wind turbine with only batteries for storage

Power Fluctuations Smoothing and Regulations in Wind Turbine Generator Systems

Wind is one of the most popular renewable energy sources and it has the potential to become the biggest energy source in future. Since the wind does not always blow constantly, the output wind power is not constant which may make some problem for the power grid. According to the grid code which is set by independent system operator, ISO, wind turbine generator systems need to follow some standards such as the predetermined acceptable power fluctuations. In order to smooth the output powers, the energy storage system and some power electronics modules are employed. The utilized power electronics modules in the wind turbine system can pursue many different goals, such as maintaining the voltage stability, frequency stability, providing the available and predetermined output active and reactive power. On the other side, the energy storage system can help achieving some of these goals but its main job is to store the extra energy when not needed and release the stored energy when needed. The energy storage system can be designed in different sizes, material and also combination of different energy storage systems (hybrid designs). Combination of power electronics devises and also energy storage system helps the wind turbine systems to smooth the output power according to the provided standards. In addition prediction of wind speed may improve the performance of wind turbine generator systems. In this research study all these three topics are studied and the obtained results are written in 10 papers which 7 of them are published and three of them are under process

Wind-powered membrane desalination of brackish water

This thesis presents a detailed investigation of the technical feasibility, challenges and performance issues associated with the direct-connection of a wind turbine to a membrane (wind-membrane) system for treating brackish water in remote communities. The direct-connection of these two technologies negates the reliance on energy storage in batteries, which are traditionally used, but result in reduced system efficiency and increased life-cycle costs. Furthermore, the lack of knowledge of the safe operating window in which transient operation of membrane systems is beneficial or tolerable can be addressed. The impact of wind speed fluctuations on the performance of the wind-membrane system (using a BW30-4040 membrane and feed waters of 2750 and 5500 mg/L NaCl) showed that the performance deteriorated most under fluctuations at low average wind speeds with high turbulence intensity and long periods of oscillation. Therefore, the main challenge of operating with renewable energy is not the size of the fluctuations, but the effect of the power switching off. Further examination of the impact of wind intermittency (over one hour intervals with intermittent periods from 0.5 – 3 min) showed that the increase in permeate concentration was highest at off-times < 60 s, highlighting the potential for improved performance using short-term energy buffering. The safe operating window and the key constraints to safe operation were determined for several membranes and feed water concentrations to establish the optimum operating strategy for the wind-membrane system. Supercapacitors were used to expand the safe operating window by providing energy during periods of intermittency and enhancing the power quality delivered to the membrane system by absorbing wind fluctuations. When tested over 24 hours using real wind speed data (average 6 m/s), the wind-membrane system produced 0.78 m3 of water with an average permeate concentration of 240 mg/L NaCl and average specific energy consumption (SEC) of 5.2 kWh/m3. With the addition of supercapacitor storage, the system performance improved significantly with 0.93 m3 of water produced with an average permeate concentration of 170 mg/L NaCl and SEC of 3.2 kWh/m3

Advanced Solutions for Renewable Energy Integration into the Grid Addressing Intermittencies, Harmonics and Inertial Response

Numerous countries are trying to reach almost 100\% renewable penetration. Variable renewable energy (VRE), for instance wind and PV, will be the main provider of the future grid. The efforts to decrease the greenhouse gasses are promising on the current remarkable growth of grid connected photovoltaic (PV) capacity. This thesis provides an overview of the presented techniques, standards and grid interface of the PV systems in distribution and transmission level. This thesis reviews the most-adopted grid codes which required by system operators on large-scale grid connected Photovoltaic systems. The adopted topologies of the converters, the control methodologies for active - reactive power, maximum power point tracking (MPPT), as well as their arrangement in solar farms are studied. The unique L(LCL)2 filter is designed, developed and introduced in this thesis. This study will help researchers and industry users to establish their research based on connection requirements and compare between different existing technologies. Another, major aspect of the work is the development of Virtual Inertia Emulator (VIE) in the combination of hybrid energy storage system addressing major challenges with VRE implementations. Operation of a photovoltaic (PV) generating system under intermittent solar radiation is a challenging task. Furthermore, with high-penetration levels of photovoltaic energy sources being integrated into the current electric power grid, the performance of the conventional synchronous generators is being changed and grid inertial response is deteriorating. From an engineering standpoint, additional technical measures by the grid operators will be done to confirm the increasingly strict supply criteria in the new inverter dominated grid conditions. This dissertation proposes a combined virtual inertia emulator (VIE) and a hybrid battery-supercapacitor-based energy storage system . VIE provides a method which is based on power devices (like inverters), which makes a compatible weak grid for integration of renewable generators of electricity. This method makes the power inverters behave more similar to synchronous machines. Consequently, the synchronous machine properties, which have described the attributes of the grid up to now, will remain active, although after integration of renewable energies. Examples of some of these properties are grid and generator interactions in the function of a remote power dispatch, transients reactions, and the electrical outcomes of a rotating bulk mass. The hybrid energy storage system (HESS) is implemented to smooth the short-term power fluctuations and main reserve that allows renewable electricity generators such as PV to be considered very closely like regular rotating power generators. The objective of utilizing the HESS is to add/subtract power to/from the PV output in order to smooth out the high frequency fluctuations of the PV power, which may occur due to shadows of passing cloud on the PV panels. A control system designed and challenged by providing a solution to reduce short-term PV output variability, stabilizing the DC link voltage and avoiding short term shocks to the battery in terms of capacity and ramp rate capability. Not only could the suggested system overcome the slow response of battery system (including dynamics of battery, controller, and converter operation) by redirecting the power surges to the supercapacitor system, but also enhance the inertial response by emulating the kinetic inertia of synchronous generator