Solar power sharing between two PV systems in a solar pyramid micro-grid

Abstract

The hybrid PV system (HyPV) is a solar PV system for self-consumption which operates at stand-alone PV mode or grid mode automatically and does not feed access PV power into grid. HyPV operates at PV mode when solar radiation or battery energy is high enough. It switches to grid mode when battery storage is low. There may be a PV generation loss if the system match between load and sizes of battery and PV modules is not proper. We proposed a networking technique, called “solar pyramid micro-grid”, which connects neighbor HyPVs, and shares solar PV power each other. The binary connection of HyPVs is the simplest design to build a solar pyramid micro-grid. Solar PV power generation of HyPVs can be shared each other through a switching control. In the present study, the binary connection of two HyPV systems at A-level (called “Hynet-2A”) was built and tested. The test results show that the sharing of access solar PV power each other can effectively increase the PV power generation of the whole micro-grid system. The long-term solar PV energy generation of Hynet-2A is close to that of grid-tied solar PV systems.