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The authors present a control strategy for a hybrid electric storage system (HESS) which comprises a
battery and a supercapacitor. To deal with load variations and fluctuations that are inherent in
generation from renewable sources, two PI loops (which are interconnected) are designed i) to control the
state-of-charge of the battery and ii) to regulate the grid voltage. Extensive experimental results are
provided to validate the working of the controller. My comments are as follows:
i) Authors claim that the proposed method has less computational burden than Model Predictive Control
(MPC). It is certainly true and that is why MPC wasn't used for controlling electrical systems until very
recently. However, with the extensive increase in computational power, a cheap microcontroller can
perform fast calculations too. Researchers are actively exploring embedded optimization (or real-time
optimization) as MPC lends a very systematic framework for designing controllers. Furthermore, as authors
in [19] show, it is feasible to control HESS with MPC. They also take care of both the objectives and
assume linear characteristic between battery and state-of-charge like it is done in the paper. I am not
aware of any limitations of that paradigm that this newly designed architecture explicitly addresses. MPC
has recently been employed for controlling power electronic converters for various other applications in
which the researchers mention that it affords them a superior dynamic performance when compared to the
conventional PI based control strategy. So, the natural question to ask is this: Does the proposed
control strategy present any advantages over MPC in terms of dynamic performance? I think the authors
compare themselves to a very convenient baseline (details of which have not been provided) and show
better performance. Instead, it would be useful if the authors could compare themselves to MPC (classical
or otherwise) and demonstrate better performance. In doing so, a critical evaluation of MPC might inform
the community of its shortcomings, atleast when it comes to controlling power electronic converters for
this particular application.