Battery Energy Storage (BES) for Mitigation of Short-Term Power Fluctuations in Large-Scale Solar PV Plant Due to Cloud Movement

The installation of large-scale solar PV plants has been increasing rapidly worldwide, and its integration presents the electricity grid with new technical challenges, as a solar panel power plant fluctuates rapidly with the movement of clouds in the sky. One of the possible and widely adopted solutions to mitigate the large fluctuation in power generation is integrating large-size battery energy storage (BES) with the solar PV plant. In this paper, an MW size fundamental-switched voltage source converter (VSC) is used in the power conditioning system (PCS) of battery energy storage (BES) for the integration of a large-scale PV plant with the grid. The BES is used to make PV plant power dispatchable by mitigating the short-term power fluctuations due to clouds' movement. For the solar PV plant power generation smoothening, a simple moving average (SMA) algorithm with a battery state of charge (SOC) control (SMA-SOC algorithm) is used in BES. In the Matlab/Simulink environment, a 10 MW solar PV plant with 5MW/2.5 MWh BES configuration is realized and then implemented in an OPAL-RT real-time simulator to validate the concept.