Power Management of a Residential Hybrid

Photovoltaic Inverter with Battery Energy Storage

System
Wei Xiong
Growatt New Energy Technology
Shiyan, Shenzhen, China
wei.xiong@growatt.com
Jianwu Zeng*
Dept. of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and Technology
Minnesota State University
Mankato, MN USA
jianwu.zeng@mnsu.edu
Liangcai Wu Hao Cheng
Growatt New Energy Technology Growatt New Energy Technology
Shiyan, Shenzhen, China Shiyan, Shenzhen, China
liangcai.wu@ginverter.com hao.cheng@growatt.com

Abstract—This paper presents power management of a grid-
connected photovoltaic (PV) inverter with battery energy
storage system (BESS) for the residential application. The
overall system is controlled at the grid level and converter level.
At the grid level, the inverter is capable of regulating the power
provided by the system controller. At the converter level, the
inverter system with BESS can manage the power while
considering the priorities of the battery or the grid, e.g., battery
first and the grid first. Different controllers are designed to
control the battery power, inverter power, and the PV power
when their priorities are changed. The experimental results
show that with the designed controllers, the system is not only
capable of dealing with the local load and source change, but
also can participate the system level control by regulating the
amount power provided by the upper level controllers.
Keywords-Battery energy storage system (BESS), photovoltaic
(PV), power management, residential
I. INTRODUCTION
With the penetration of the sustainable energy, the
installation of the renewable energy generator such as the
wind turbine and photovoltaic (PV) array has been increased
drastically during the past decade. For example, solar energy,
the fastest growing source of the power [1] and has
experienced an average annual growth rate of 59% [2]. These
energy sources are distributed in wide area and such
distributed generators (DGs) can help to fully make use of the
abundant clean renewable energy [3].
One of characteristics of the renewable energy is its
intermittence, e.g., the solar energy has diurnal characteristic,
the energy can only be generated during the daytime when
the weather condition is fair. On one hand, it can lead to
uncertainties in the power system planning and operation,
particularly, under high PV penetration. On the other hand,
since the load requires the continuous power from the energy
sources, it is expected to add extra energy sources to provide
the power when there is deficient while absorbing the power
when there is surplus. The adding of the energy storage units
such as batteries and ultra-capacitors to the renewable energy
generation system have the potential to solve the
aforementioned problems [4]-[6].
With the increasing penetration of the solar energy and
growth in demand for a highly reliable energy supply, the
battery energy storage system (BESS) is expected to be used
together with the PV inverter to achieve both power
generation and self-consumption [7].
Due to the use of the BESS, the overall energy conversion
system is more reliable than that using the PV inverter only
[8],[9]. It is possible to achieve the peak shaving [10], fully
use the peak-valley time-of-use (TOU) price [11], and
participating the power system level control as the traditional
power generators.
To manage the power flow of these energy sources and
the load, control strategy as well as real-time controllers are
need to be properly designed for the different operation
modes of the system [12]. The control strategy generally can
be categorized into two types: centralized [13] and the
decentralized control [14]. The centralized control requires
communications among the different converters and it is
relative simple compared to the decentralized control. In this
paper, the centralized control strategy is used to simulate the
grid-level control.
This paper presents a power management strategy for a
PV-battery system at two different levels: converter level and
the grid level. At the converter level, the controllers balance
the power between the generation and the consumption while
considering the priority of the battery and the grid. At the
grid-level, the system can participate the power scheduling if
necessary.
II. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION AND CONTROL STRATEGY
Fig. 1 shows the system configuration of the grid-
connected PV inverter with battery energy storage for the
residential application. The overall system consists of a boost
converter which interfaces with the PV array, a bidirectional
DC-DC converter (BDC) connected to a battery bank, a grid-
connected inverter, and a load. The BDC consists of a H-
bridge LLC resonant converter and a buck-boost converter,
the inverter is capable of working in rectifier mode as well.
Therefore, the power flows of the battery and the grid are
bidirectional as shown in Fig. 1.
The objective of this system is to manage the power flow
of the battery, PV array, and the grid under the different

978-1-7281-2455-1/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE

450
 Fig. 1. The structure of the grid-connected PV inverter with BESS.

condition. For example, when the solar power is more than
the load power, the surplus power will be stored in the battery
with higher priority than delivering to the grid if the SOC of
the battery is low.
To achieve these functions, real-time controllers are need
to be designed for each converter and organized in a proper
manner. Fig. 2 shows the flowchart of this two-level control
strategy. At the grid level, the power can be directly
controlled by operator/consumers via the remote control. The
power command can be directly sent to the converter level
controllers. For example, when the power reference is
positive, the inverter works in the generator mode, the power
Start
RemoteCtrlEn
== Charge ?
Y Pcmd = RemoteCtrlPower
Grid level
is supposed to be delivered to the grid; while the negative
reference power indicates the inverter will work in the
rectifier mode, the power is delivered from the grid to the
inverter.
At the converter level, if there is power reference from the
grid-level, the inverter will regulate the power provided by
the grid-level controller, otherwise, the inverter reference
power will be generated from the local controllers at the
converter level. As shown in Fig. 2, it will check the battery,
the grid, and the load with the decrease priorities to meet the
power balance while protecting the battery from the over
charge or over discharge. The power is finally balanced by
regulating the battery current.
III. CONTROLLERS DESIGN
This paper focus on the controllers’ design of the BDC
and the inverter. The controller’s design of the boost
converter will not be included. Fig. 3 shows the signal flow
of the battery loops which includes inner current loop and the

N
outer voltage loop. To protect the battery from over
RemoteCtrlEn
Y Pcmd = -RemoteCtrlPower
charging/discharging, the charge/discharging voltage and the
==Discharge ?
current are limited. The battery reference current (icRef) is the
N minimum current of the iclimit and icp, where iclimit is the
maximum charge current; icp is the current calculated from
BatFirst ? Y Pcmd = LocalCtrlChgPercent the reference battery power. Then the reference current is
limited by the characteristic of the battery and the power
N reference. The battery current then is regulated by controller
Ci(s) which is designed based on Gid(s). The voltage
GridFirst ? Y Pcmd = LocalCtrlDishgPercent
controller Cv(s) is designed from Giv(s) which cutoff
frequency is 1/10 of that of the current loop.
Converter level

N
Fig. 4 shows the signal flow of the inverter when it works
LoadFirst Pcmd = Pref +0.5PM in the grid-connected mode. The DC bus voltage is controlled
by the inverter so that the generated solar power can be
delivered to the load. Besides, the inverter can eject the
Pref = PowerDerate(Pcmd);
reactive power to the grid as well if generated power is more
than the demand. The current then is regulated by its inner
IbbRef = (Pref / Vbus1) + IbbCompensate current controller CiL(s).
When the inverter works in the island mode, the bus
voltage is controlled by the boost converter as shown in Fig.
End
5(a), the PV array may not work in the maximum power point
tracking mode. The output voltage of the inverter is regulated
Fig. 2. The flowchart of two-level control strategy.
by its voltage controller Co(s) as shown in Fig. 5(b).

451
 ic lim it

VBat Re f ic Re f ic
Ci ( s ) Gid ( s ) Giv ( s )
Cv ( s)

VBat ic

Fig. 3. The control blocks of the battery.

iq Re f
v Bus Qcmd Par sin g
vg

VBus Re f I d Re f id Re f i L Re f
C Bus (s ) C iL (s ) Ginv (s )

vg iL
sin ωt
PLL

Fig. 4. The signal flow of the inverter in grid-connected mode.

vBus Re f + i pv Re f + d i pv vBus
C1 ( s) C2 ( s) Gid (s) G vi (s)
−
− i pv
vBus
(a)

vo iload vo

Vo Re f il Re f i L Re f
C o (s ) CiL (s ) Ginv (s )

iL

(b)
Fig. 5. The signal flow of the inverter in island mode. (a) Bus voltage loop; (b) inverter voltage and current loop.

8 kW load is connected and disconnected. As shown in Fig.

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
To validate the effectiveness of the controllers, a hybrid
PV and battery system is built. The nominal power of the PV,
battery, and the inverter are 4 kW, 3 kW, and 6 kW,
respectively. Fig. 6 shows the overall experimental setup. It
includes a PV simulator, Li-ion battery bank, converters
which includes boost converter, inverter, and the BDC, the
grid simulator and the load.
Fig. 7 shows the measured transient waveforms when an
7, when there is no load, the generated solar power is charged
to the battery and the current is 50 A, when the 8 kW load is
added, the grid provides the deficient power and the battery
is changed from the charge mode to the discharge mode;
when the load is disconnected, the grid power decreases and
the battery is switched to the charge mode, during the
transient, the bus voltage (vbus) and the PV voltage (vpv) are
controlled to be constant.

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 Fig. 6. Experimental setup.

Fig. 7. Measured transient waveforms when the 8 kW load is connected and disconnected.

ibat
vbus

iinv

Grid first Battery first Grid first

Fig. 8. The transition between the grid first and the battery first.
Fig. 8 shows the transition when the system is switched power and the stored battery energy instead of the grid power,
from grid first to battery first mode. When the grid has higher the battery then works in the discharge mode. When the
priority than the battery, the system tends to use the solar priority of the battery is higher than the grid, e.g., the SOC of

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the battery is low, the battery is charged by the PV and the
grid. During the switching transient, the bus voltage is
constant with small overshoot within short period.
To participate the grid-level power management, the
system needs to transit from one mode to the other within
certain time period, e.g., charge mode to the discharge mode.
Fig. 9 shows the transition between the charge and discharge
mode when the power reference is changed remotely at the
grid-level. As shown in Fig. 9, the battery current is changed
from the charge mode to the discharge mode within one
second, during the whole transition, the bus voltage is
maintained at a constant value.
Fig. 10 shows the battery power when the priority of the
battery, grid, and the load is changed. When the battery has
the highest priority, e.g., from 20:10- 20:15, the battery is
charged with 1400 W; when the grid is set the highest priority,
the battery discharges with 1600 W during the time slot of
20:15-20:21.
iinv ibat
vbus
Fig. 9. The transition of regulating the power from the system-level
controller.
1800
Disharge
1600
V. CONCLUSION
This paper presents control of a residential grid connected
PV inverter with the BESS. Various controllers are first
designed for each converter to regulate its voltage and
current. These controllers then are properly organized to
manage the power flows of the battery and the inverter while
considering different priorities. The experimental results
show that with these controllers, the system is capable of
balancing the power as well as smoothly switching from one
mode to another.
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Fig. 10. Measured battery power when priorities are changed.

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