Adaptive controllers for enhancement of stand-alone hybrid system performance

This paper presents a stand-alone hybrid renewable energy system (SHRES) consisting of solar photovoltaic (PV), wind turbine (WT) and battery energy storage (BES) in an effort reduce the dependence on fossil fuels. The renewable energy sources have individual inverters and the PV inverter of the SHRES is operated using active and reactive power control. The PV inverter have two main control structures which are active power control and reactive power control and each contain a proportional integral (PI) controller. Accurate control of the PV inverter’s active power is essential for PV curtailment applications. Thus, this paper aims to enhance the performance of the SHRES in this work by optimizing the performance of the PV inverter’s active power PI controller parameters through the design of adaptive controllers. Therefore, an adaptive controller and an optimized adaptive controller are proposed in this paper. The performances of the proposed controllers are evaluated by minimizing the objective function which is the integral of the time weighted absolute error (ITAE) criterion and this performance is then compared with a controller that is tuned by the traditional trial and error method. Simulation results showed that the optimized adaptive controller is better as it recorded an error improvement of 42.59%. The dynamic optimized adaptive controller is more adept at handling the fast changes of the SHRES operation.