Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

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Journal of Energy Storage

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/est

From Uninterruptible Power Supply to resilient smart micro grid: The case of T
a battery storage at telecommunication station
⁎
M. Ferraro, G. Brunaccini , F. Sergi, D. Aloisio, N. Randazzo, V. Antonucci
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto di Tecnologie Avanzate per l'Energia “Nicola Giordano” Via S. Lucia sopra Contesse, 5, Messina, Italy

A B S T R A C T

Nowadays, resilient grids meet growing interest for their capability of supplying critical load even in case of power fault coming from grid disturbance and natural
disasters. To do this, such grids involve redundant apparatus and predictive control schemes.
For high value services, unexpected system unavailability is source of economic losses to the providers. Hence, beside the internal energy storage devices, such
plants had better to have redundancy of energy sources (e.g. electrical grid and natural gas network) and tailored power flows control strategies still valid even in the
case of energy shortage. On the other hand, distributed storage resources is attracting growing interest to support the power networks in terms of both resiliency and
flexibility facing the impact of generation from the Renewable Energy Sources.
In this work, a power supply system controller based on Artificial Intelligence was developed and simulated to wisely operate the storage resources to serve the ICT
equipment as Uninterruptible Power Supply (above all in case of emergency) as fundamental mission. Secondly, the investigation assessed the capability, to offer
ancillary services to the power network increasing its resiliency measured system response in terms of survival time during grid faults and restoration transient time
to recover initial service level.

1. Introduction
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector compa-
nies can offer their high value (telecommunications based) services,
such as e-commerce, video broadcast, financial transactions, supply
chain management, thanks to the wide territorial distribution of ICT
infrastructure (base transceiver stations, landline stations, data centers,
and so on). However, the services quality and the related economic
income are closely linked to the continuity of the service itself, due to
both (in case of downtime) loss of throughput (i.e. payload) and the
contract penalties toward the customer. Beside equipment and software
failure, service downtime may originate in power supply fault, whose
primary causes are weather related [1].
To contrast this threat, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems
are installed in the equipment site to let the apparatus survive during
the absence of external (i.e. electric grid) power.
The role of internal UPS storage is fundamental to avoid payload
loss and contract penalties to ICT providers, which are usually applied
in case of service interruptions. However, due to the limited time of grid
faults (70 to 130 min per user, on Italian average, according to [2]), its
activity is too limited to the electricity supply during sporadic emer-
gency periods.
Moreover, if adequately rewarded, the power exchange with the
Distribution System Operator (DSO) would reduce its effort in energy
management [3], and so turning the internal storage into a resource
even for power network services.
Consequently, the storage resources entirely dedicated to the
emergency when used as UPS could be wisely exploited to support
power grids preventing their State-of-Charge (SoC) from being too low
just during the grid fault. In such scenario, a specific literature (dedi-
cated to find a possible trade-off between the costs, the survival time,
and potential additional services) is currently addressed to the so-called
“resiliency” feature [4,5] of such kind of systems.
For this reason, since the grid faults are inherently unexpected, a
method to guarantee the energy storage dual use (UPS and Grid
Service) must be implemented.
In this work, to address the system resiliency matter, starting from
weather forecast signals, electricity price variability over time, and a
power load profile already analyzed in literature [6], a Fuzzy Logic
based controller was developed to improve the energy storage resources
utilization. Thanks to the absence of constraints linked to ICT field re-
quirements, the developed controller based on AI may be extended to
any active (i.e. with internal generation and/or storage) grid tied
system application towards infrastructure resilience-oriented.
Additionally, the potential benefit from adding a controllable in-
ternal generator GEN-SET to the UPS aiming at reducing the power
demand from grid and increasing the system flexibility while providing
the grid with ancillary services was evaluated. In this latter case, the

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: giovanni.brunaccini@itae.cnr.it (G. Brunaccini).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2020.101207
Received 15 April 2019; Received in revised form 4 October 2019; Accepted 8 January 2020
Available online 16 January 2020
2352-152X/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
M. Ferraro, et al.
Abbreviations
RES renewable energy sources
ICT information and communication technology
UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply
DSO distribution system operator
SoC state-of-charge
SOFC solid oxide fuel cell
AI artificial intelligence
FL fuzzy logic
SAIDI system average interruption duration index
SAIFI system average interruption frequency index
GMD geo-magnetic disturbance
FC fuel cell
FLM fuzzy logic machine
PBATT battery (electrical) power
PLOAD load (electrical) consumption
PGEN fuel cell power generation
generator represents an additional power supply, which can contribute
to increase the security of the ICT load supply.
Since in a previous activity a hybrid battery/fuel cell system pro-
totype was developed [7] for a landline station power supply, in the
evaluated plant a component was dedicated to model the electrical
characteristics of that generator. For the same reason, the weather
conditions and electricity price data refer to that installation site (Pa-
lermo, Italy).
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Theoretical approach
According to [8, 9], the most part of grid faults roots in natural
events. Among these, about 87% are weather related (mainly strong
wind and heavy rain, but even due to lightning and ice storm), and the
remaining to animals and fire. Currently, other minor causes are car
accidents, intentional attacks, and planned maintenance. This state-
ment leads to use weather forecast as a good option to base prediction
algorithms to the UPS discharge/charge processes, as well as novel
battery exploitation algorithms.
Moreover, provided that the weather forecast gives indications
about the probability of phenomena, such as rain intensity, wind speed,
snowfall, sky clarity index and so on, the prediction algorithm must
complies with such kind of indications. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence
(AI) techniques can be fruitfully applied to cope with non deterministic
and only partially numerically defined phenomena.
For instance, the wind speed is a variable characterized by an ex-
pected average value around which the actual values vary with dy-
namics not reported in the weather forecast bulletin. Consequently, the
wind characterization can be expressed with intervals labeled as:
“calm”, “light breeze”, “breeze”, “strong”, “storm”, and so on, like in
[10].
Similarly, it is possible to categorize the price (either as cost or as
payout) of a single kWh as “low”, “intermediate”, “high” or to express
weather with equivalent terms. According to a set of conditions (i.e. an
energy market set of rules, e.g. in a predetermined observation time
window of a selected grid node in a given time of the year), the algo-
rithm determines if it is convenient to sell (or buy) an “energy packet”
or not. Clearly, each labeling term includes a range of values, and,
usually, the different ranges are partially superposed.
To cope with such kind of data, a well-known AI technique is Fuzzy
Logic (FL). FL can associate not univocally (numerically) defined va-
lues, as in the everyday human language, to a set of probabilities (for
each single variable considered) of affinity with value within a so called
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Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
List of variables
wind speed m/s
weather signal /
rain height mm
ambient pressure mbar
battery capacity kWh
fuel cell power kW
grid power kW
battery power kW
load power kW
SoC %
electricity price c€/kWh
natural gas price €/m3
grid rate %
battery charge/discharge efficiency /
“membership function”.
With respect to other AI techniques in literature, such as neural
networks [11–13], genetic algorithms [14, 15] or multi-agent systems
[16, 17], FL:
- requires less computational effort [18],
- deals with not unambiguous (i.e. not entirely categorized) set of
data,
- can be supported by a-priori rules (by defining its inference engine)
rooting in the human-like reasoning,
- is already present in the electric microgrid control literature [19].
Fuzzy logic control was already adopted in hybrid generation (re-
newable and fuel cell) and storage (battery and electrolyzer) archi-
tecture, in literature, to regulate the hydrogen production/consumption
[20]. On the contrary, in the present work, the effort is focused on
exploiting the existing natural gas infrastructure, so that the SOFC
technology appears as a reasonable design choice despite being char-
acterized by a very limited operating point variation dynamics.
Therefore, almost always in the observation window (with limited ex-
ceptions in case of prolonged grid failure) the FC working point is
constant (steady state operation) and the FL controller operates the
battery control and power flow through the grid.
Finally, concerning the “resiliency” goal, despite the absence of an
official standardized definition, a characterization (as “list of features”)
of resilient systems widely adopted is presented in [21, 22]. In the re-
ferred literature, some metric indicators (to compare different reactions
to disaster events) are specified. Most of such indicators are based on
impacts of the system response during the disaster transient. Sometime
those impacts are only qualitatively evaluable, since they are correlated
to the user perception of the service quality, e.g. the reduction of ser-
vice quality and restoration time. Moreover, due to their importance
and contract penalties, current high value service systems are designed
addressing the service reliability. Hence, the design focuses to the
survival against events characterized by high occurrence probability
but with moderate consequences. Therefore, indicators as SAIDI and
SAIFI [23, 24] are adequate and well defined to characterize their re-
liability. On the contrary, resilience oriented design is addressed to
react and survive to less frequent and highly impacting events, such as
storms, Geo-Magnetic Disturbance (GMD), and anthropic correlated
disasters.
In this perspective, resilient systems take into account the points of
view of the both service customer and system operation. In particular,
according to dedicated literature, resiliency indicators involve the im-
pacts of the disaster event on the service available to the customer [21]
M. Ferraro, et al.
and the system response to restore (as soon as possible) the usually
provided service as the disaster did not occur [22].
Once defined the control logic technique and the evaluable data, the
developed algorithm requires the definition of its effectiveness opera-
tional range. In other words, due to physical, technical, economic
limitations of the controlled system operation, the algorithm must be
tuned to avoid crossing thresholds towards meaningless system states
and define threshold values that, if overcome, trigger corrective actions.
For this reason, beside the battery model already developed by the
authors in a previous activity [7], in the developed simulation tool, the
boundary condition was the minimum acceptable selected storage ca-
pacity (i.e. SoC) at the end of the grid fault, as per an ordinary ICT
infrastructure station. This can be reasonably used as a baseline to fix a
lowermost limit to the storage size design.
Moreover, three main processes were carried out:
(1) FL implementation of the control algorithm (to evaluate the eco-
nomic impact of correct and wrong grid fault predictions);
(2) Fuel Cell (FC) integration: this includes an internal energy source to
evaluate its benefits (if any) in both configurations with UPS only
and combined with FL.
(3) Assessment of the controller behavior: to verify if the system re-
siliency was well addressed, by investigating the expected opera-
tion of the system during the running of main algorithm (i.e. fuzzy
operation) and during the “out of bounds” (i.e. emergency and re-
covery periods) customized corrections.
2.2. Simulation data sources (load profile, electricity price, natural gas
price)
To assess the described algorithm in a field-like environment, the
simulations were carried out basing the implementation on real data
coming from open access databases for energy price and weather report
signals (from weather stations around the prototype installation site).
On the other hand, to analyze the validity of the algorithm against
different weather and price conditions, 12 daily load profiles (one per
each month in a year) have been simulated. Starting from the above
referred literature paper [6], the adopted power profile in each day was
a re-scaling of a single week whose samples (3 min time slots) were
averaged according to the monthly power load (in each time slot)
measured from energy billing of the prototype installation site, reported
in Fig. 1.
Therefore, both weather conditions and energy prices (Fig. 2) were
sampled in each time slot of the 13th (arbitrarily selected) day in each
month.
In this work, different configurations were analyzed to determine
the economic effect (with respect to the UPS only function) of the
storage resource exploitation to convert the ICT station into an active
user (so called “prosumer”). The prosumer can buy or sell power in the
“day-ahead market” (so called “mercato del giorno prima”, in Italy),
whose selling prices have regional validity and 1-h time slot basis.
From the economic evaluation point of view, depending on the
Fig. 1. Load power profile. 12 days, each representing a month on the base of the daily average energy consumption according to the installation site electricity bills.
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Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
hardware configuration (battery only, FC only, hybrid) the electrical
energy tariff and/or the natural gas (to feed the FC generator) price
have to be taken into account. According to tabled values in [25]
(Italian average case for “industrial like” natural gas supply) the natural
gas price (raw material only, excluding indirect costs and taxes) is
about 0.18 €/m3 (on average, in Italy, the raw material component
represents the 39% of the end user tariff).
To have a cost comparison with the extreme opposite case,i.e. in-
ternal generation only (without battery control), a simulation step fo-
cused on the insertion of a fuel cell generator without the batteries. This
implied to assume that no grid faults occurred in the observation
windows. In that case, the gas consumption is compensated by the re-
duction of energy purchase from the grid. However, the performed
evaluation did not include three additional costs sources:
- Contract penalties due to the occurrence of grid faults (since these
events cannot be supported due to the absence of batteries);
- Maintenance and performance degradation of the fuel cell generator
and batteries;
- Capital cost difference between batteries and FC generator (that
depends even on the future expectations about batteries and FC
technologies development and mass production costs).
For these reasons, only an energy cost evaluation was carried out.
2.3. Control system architecture
In the adopted approach, a two-layer Fuzzy Logic Machine (FLM)
architecture was implemented. This was done, as reported in Fig. 3, by
one FLM in the first stadium that, in each time step of the simulations,
elaborates data coming from weather signals to determine whether a
grid fault occurrence has relevant probability or not. In details, the FLM
is fed with wind speed and expected rain intensity in the time step, and
return a “defuzzyfied” boolean output variable (hereinafter referred as
“MODE” or “mode”) to select the appropriate FLM in the second sta-
dium of the control architecture. The boolean first layer output variable
assumes either “normal” or “resilient” value whether the grid fault
probability is considered negligible or relevant, respectively.
After this, in the latter layer of the control system, the either acti-
vated FLM (“normal” or “resilient” in each single step) by the mode
value determines the battery power (indeed the fraction of the load
request supplied by the battery) and, thus, how to distribute the in-
ternal load power demand between power network and battery. To do
this, two main topics must be discussed to clarify the control system
procedure:
(1) The two second layer FLMs differ from each other since the
“normal” mode FLM uses load power, battery SoC, and electricity
price as input variables; on the contrary, the “resilient” mode FLM,
due to the relevant risk of grid fault, does not include the energy
price as an input variable;
(2) In the system architecture addressed to assess the potential benefits
M. Ferraro, et al.
Fig. 2. Electricity price profile (hourly tariff) of the (arbitrarily chosen to synchronize weather conditions) day 13th of each month (year 2017).
of the internal power generation (FC generator), the FC design
power was selected to entirely satisfy the annual energy request at
steady state (for efficiency maximization matter). This is equivalent
to use grid and battery as energy buffers to negotiate the power
injection/draining.
To test the validity of the selected fuzzy logic approach, two grid
fault periods were artificially inserted in the simulated system.
According to the occurrence of grid faults phenomena correlation with
weather forecast in the installation site, the above mentioned artificial
faults were triggered in the two days that represent the period of year
more affected by high speed wind (January) and raindrops (November).
Beside this, to have numerical indicators of the importance of correct
weather forecast, in the second phase of the development procedure,
the grid faults were forced in time slots characterized by very low
probability of “real” occurrence (i.e. sunny weather and/or low wind
speed) to estimate the impact of erroneous fault predictions.
An alternative representation, with more details, can be done by
flowcharts (reported in Fig. 3b and 3c), to describe the internal logic to
distinguish:
- the fuzzy logic operation intervals (i.e. constraints),
- the corrections in case of extended emergency periods (red and blue
blocks in Fig. 3a),
- the two separate pathways triggered by the normal/resilient com-
mutation (orange block in Fig. 3a),
- the SoC (iterative) calculation.
2.4. Simulated control system implementation: data source, raw data pre-
processing
The FL controller implementation was developed in MATLAB/
Simulink environment, by using the dedicated toolbox. To make the
wind speed and rain intensity signals coherent with the fuzzy logic
controller, their variation intervals were divided into (partially super-
posing) sub-intervals labeled as in Table 1.
To determine the membership intervals widths, the inclusion of all
the recorded values highlighted that only in few periods (i.e. time
steps), for example, the wind speed was greater than 15 m/s, despite
reaching very rare peak values of about 35 m/s, as visible in Fig. 4.
For this reason, the distribution of the membership intervals, as
visible in Fig. 5, is quite biased toward the low speed values with re-
spect to the usual intervals assignment in the Beaufort scale. In other
words, despite the 35 m/s speed peak, there is only one interval
(“high”) to collect wind speed samples over 18 m/s, since the high wind
speed only (i.e. in absence of intense rain) is uncommonly sufficient to
cause grid faults. This allows to have better resolution at low wind
speed values (which are most common in the selected site), to distin-
guish (without increasing too much the number of intervals) values that
can cause a grid disconnection if supported by heavy rain (Fig. 6 and
Table 3).
The weather signal was calculated by the raw indications of the
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Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
weather bulletin (rain probability, wind gust, expected pressure, re-
ported in Error! Reference source not found.) by a weighted sum to
synthetize in a single number the following parameters:
- Rain intensity: “dry/no rain”, “light”, “moderate”, “heavy”, “violent”.
This was made by mapping the Rr index into a 0 to 1 interval, where:
actual rain height
Rr =
maximum rain height (1)
- Wind gust to wind average speed ratio: due to the potential impact
of wind gust on electric infrastructure, this parameters was ac-
counted for additional severity of damage causes. Done by mapping
the Wr index into a 0 to 1 interval, where:
Wr =
maximum wind speed in the sampling interval
overall maximum wind speed (2)
Indeed, due to the behavior of the “ratio” function, this parameter
was added only if the daily average wind speed was higher than the
average yearly wind speed;
- The expected pressure was treated by considering the difference
between the room pressure (1013 mbar) and the tabled values, to
have a normalization of the overall pressure values span. Done by
mapping Pr scaled in a 0 to 1 interval, where:
actual pressure − 1013
Pr =
actual pressure − maximum pressure (3)
The combination of the above mentioned raw signals was performed
by a weighted average. The adopted weights were correlated to the
typical climatic conditions of the investigation site. Thus, wind (i.e.
pressure gradients around the standard atmospheric value) has higher
impact with respect of rainfall (it is a Mediterranean climate with
sporadic heavy rain days, as visible in the table data of the Italian
National Institute of Statistics [26]) and wind gust (rare in the site,
visible as statistical data in [27] and [28]). For this reason, pressure had
weight 0.4, and 0.25 the both wind gust and rainfall intensity. Despite
being (strictly speaking) arbitrary, to consider that, in case of rainfall, a
strong wind gust could generate spray over the apparatus (and outdoor
connections), it was considered as an educated guess imposing the sum
of the two weaker contributions as more impacting than the pressure
gradient only. This allowed reducing the fuzzy logic machine com-
plexity (i.e. the number of combinations of the input variables) and the
number of Boolean rules of the inference engine [29].
The weighted sum was normalized to give similar contribution to all
the 3 factors and the result (in an overall span from 0 to 7) and dis-
tributed with two (external) triangular membership functions and one
trapezoidal (inner) membership function, as visible in Fig. 7.
These two signals (i.e. wind speed and weather) allowed to determine
the working mode of the second layer FLM by elaboration in a Mamdani
inference engine [30], whose rules are addressed to categorize each
M. Ferraro, et al. Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

Fig. 3. (a) Block diagram of the simulation algorithm, consisting of: the two layer FLM section, SoC updating block (light green), restoration action after power
network recovery (dark green)), emergency state “out-of-bounds” interventions (red, light blue), and grid fault generator (orange). (b) and (c) detailed representation
of the internal logic by means of flow charts (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.).

5
M. Ferraro, et al.
Table 1
Wheatear conditions and wind speed intervals definition.
Weather signal clear variable
Wind speed low low interm. average high interm.
time step as resilient” or “normal”, depending on the expectation of a
grid fault or not, respectively. Generally speaking, “resilient” time steps
are characterized by “high” or “high intermediate” wind speed values and
“heavy rain” or the uppermost slot of the “low rain” set, or the combi-
nation (Boolean “AND”) of the two both.
On the other hand, (depending on the time step mode) the inference
engine of the second layer FLM converts the input variables (SoC,
electricity price, and required power) membership probability (each in
its own membership intervals) into a grid/battery power ratio. This
process consists of two steps operating sequentially to determine the
output variable:
(1) Selection of the most probable membership interval (labeled as
“BBg”, “bbg”, “bbgg”, “bgg”, “bGG” from the most battery biased to
the most grid biased);
(2) Defuzzyfication: the conversion of the output variable membership
probabilities (in different intervals) into a numerical value.
The two steps are graphically reported in Fig. 8, identifying the five
output intervals and the “GridRate” reconstruction plots.
2.5. Analytical section of the control algorithm
Beside the AI control capability of the FLM blocks in the diagram in
Fig. 3a, the developed algorithm is based on the power flows equili-
brium at the delivery node (system to grid interface). This means that
the compensation of the discrepancy between the load power con-
sumption and the internal (FC) and external (grid) generation is oper-
ated by the battery:
Pload = Pgrid + Pbatt + PFC
Once defined the net load as the difference between internal load
and internal generation from the FC system:
Pload − PFC = Pnetload
and the Eq. (4) becomes:
Pnetload = Pgrid + Pbatt
Eq. (6) is used to calculate the two separated contributions (grid and
storage) after the FL machine (normal and resilient cases) define the
fraction of the net load power provided by the battery.
Special cases of this equation are the load following operated by the
battery in case of emergency (grid fault), both without internal gen-
eration (configuration #2 and #4 in later paragraphs)
Pload = Pbatt
Fig. 4. Wind speed recording (on three-minute base sampling and averaging) from a weather station close to the prototype installation site.
Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
and with the fuel cell generator:
Pnet _ load = Pbatt (7.2)
bad
By following the signals path in the block diagram, after this com-
high putation, the two green blocks determine the updated values of the
battery SoC. The formula used, taking into account the power dis-
crepancy compensated by the battery in a time slot (whose duration is
T), the actual power “injected to” / “extracted from” the battery de-
pends on the charge/discharge efficiency [31]
Pbatt *T
SoCkT = SoC(k − 1) T + *η
Battery energy ch . (8.1)
Pbatt *T
SoCkT = SoC(k − 1) T − /η
Battery energy dis . (8.2)
where ηch.and ηdis..are the efficiency of the battery in charge and dis-
charge phase, respectively.
3. Implemented simulations and results
3.1. Normal and resilient modes simulation in selected configurations
3.1.1. Current context architecture (benchmark cases) and novel
implementations
Since, to try to improve the energy utilization and economic system
results, two actions were undertaken (energy market exploitation and
FL control), two were the benchmark cases as well:
- The current electrical energy storage (i.e. UPS function only) –
Benchmark A
- The storage utilization for the market exploitation without FL con-
trol – Benchmark B.
Starting from these two basic configurations and the ideal case (no
grid faults and internal generation), different hardware and control
algorithm configurations were implemented (summarized in Table 2) to
achieve an economic (net energy cost only) evaluation.
(4)
3.1.2. Batteries used as UPS system – Benchmark A simulation
To evaluate the benefits coming from the battery exploitation for
grid services and (additionally) integration of a fuel cell generator, the
(5) benchmark case was firstly evaluated in terms of system surviving
margin (remaining SoC after grid restoration) and energy cost for the
whole 12 days period.
(6) In this case, the load is always supplied by the grid (batteries are
idle) except for the “emergency” state (i.e. grid fault), during which the
battery are discharged by supplying the load; after grid restoration,
batteries are charged up to 80% SoC. Indeed, this threshold was
adopted to make this benchmark system comparable to the developed/
analyzed cases, since the expected storage services must include also a
reserved (i.e. dedicated to the grid) capacity to provide energy ab-
sorption when required due to the aggregated demand is lower than the
(7.1) expected load (demand response / peak smoothing).
6
M. Ferraro, et al.
Fig. 5. Representation of the wind speed distribution toward FL membership function subdivision.
On the other hand, the choice of the battery energy content was
based to limit the SoC minimum value at the end of the grid fault (to
limit the lifetime reduction effects due to potential deep discharge) to
25%. Under these conditions, the algorithm simulated two grid faults
(corresponding to the most rainy and the most windy month, January
and November, respectively).The former (to test the system surviva-
bility) was triggered while the batteries were under the usual end-of-
recharge threshold (60% in the initial part of the profile in Fig. 9). This
is comparable to a second grid fault before the expected re-charge of the
storage system, after a previous interruption. From the above-men-
tioned conditions, the required (as benchmark case) storage capacity
was 50kWh.
Once completed such setup phase and according to the electricity
price profile, the cost of electrical energy was calculated to supply the
simulated load profile, and it resulted in 45.93 €.
3.1.3. Non-fuzzy control algorithm of a self-sustaining system – Benchmark
B simulation
Before analyzing and compare different FL based control config-
urations, a basic controller (in terms of economic benefit, i.e. the
average daily cost of the energy component) was done by simulating (as
Fig. 6. Raw signals collection from weather station (wind gust, ambient pressure, rainfall) and their weighted combination to synthetize a global FLM input variable.
7
Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
benchmark) a controller whose target is to maintain the battery SoC
around a selected value, 60% (i.e. the center of the 30% - 90% opera-
tional bend) in the performed simulation. This value allows to have a
large capacity span both in energy absorption and delivery (i.e. charge
and discharge, respectively) as appropriate to provide energy service
like capacity reserve. In this simulation, in each time step of the si-
mulation, the net load (difference between FC generation and load
power request) is distributed between grid and battery, as either surplus
or deficit. Once set two allowed SoC extreme values and two battery
power limits (SoCmin, SoCmax, Pmin, and Pmax, in Fig. 10, respectively),
the actual battery power value will be determined according to the
following rules:
(1) Net load > 0 (FC power exceeds load request, red line in Fig. 10):
the higher is the SoC, the lower is the battery charge and the higher
is the power injected into the grid;
(2) Net load < 0 (FC power is lower than the load request, blue line in
Fig. 10): the higher is the SoC, the higher is the battery discharge
and the lower is the power drained from the grid;
The FC generator nominal power was set close to the average value
M. Ferraro, et al. Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

Fig. 7. Representation of the membership function for the "weather" variable to determine the controller operational mode (“normal/resilient” from the first layer
FLM).

of the load (2.66kW), to use the battery as a buffer to “smooth” the
delay between the power production and load demand. This hypothesis
appears not restrictive to the general validity of the algorithm, since the
expected load behavior (at least on average) is known at system design
time. As a main consequence, this will result in a reduced utilization of
grid power (system tailored on self consumption), so that the grid
service will be unburden in the most of the runtime. Secondly, the total
span of the battery SoC appears limited to ± 20%, letting the battery
capable of providing reserve capacity in case of appropriate economic
contracts. Moreover, among the benefits for the electric grid, the local

Fig. 8. representation of the “grid/battery” power subdivision as controller output variable to satisfy the load (in pure battery configurations) or to compensate for
the discrepancy between load and FC generation (in FC and hybrid configurations).

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M. Ferraro, et al. Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

Table 2
Summary of the simulated scenarios: ideal (no faults), non-fuzzy (benchmark), fuzzy control variations (for fault prediction and economic assessment).
Scenario (Configuration #) Fuel cell Battery control logic Faults (weather effect)

Ideal (1) Yes UPS No

Benchmark A (2) No UPS Yes
Benchmark B (3) Yes Non-fuzzy (SoC based) Yes
No HW modifications (4) No Fuzzy (price/SoC/weather) Yes
Ideal fuzzy (5) Yes Fuzzy No
Conservative (6) Yes Fuzzy / resilient recharge No
Pessimistic (7) Yes Fuzzy, low sensitivity Yes, 2 bad predictions
Optimistic (8) Yes Fuzzy, low sensitivity Yes, 2 good predictions
High sensitivity (9) Yes Fuzzy, high sensitivity Yes, 2 good predictions

Table 3
summary of the expected income values and the percentage loss with respect to the ideal case without grid failures.
Scenario Base No fault Conservative Pessimistic Optimistic Optimistic + mod. exchange

12 days income / € (energy component only) 11.76 11.04 10.97 11.15 11.52
Income variation percentage / -6.12% -6.72% -5.19% -2.04%

Fig. 9. Simulation of the ordinary system (i.e. battery as UPS, Benchmark A) against a prolonged grid fault even starting before the full UPS batteries re-charge.

Fig. 10. Scheme of the non-fuzzy power distribution relation between batteries
and grid of the discrepancy between FC generation and load, for the Benchmark
B configuration.
power production limits the line losses and reduces the line overloading
(power peaks), with a high conversion efficiency plant.
With the described power subdivision function, the battery recharge
current/power is as higher as the battery SoC is lower (if net load < 0),
by injecting less power into the grid. On the other hand, the battery
discharge current/power increases with SoC and more power will be
injected into the power network. A dual behavior will occur when the
instantaneous load exceeds the FC generation (as in Fig. 11).
Concerning with the limitation of the selected scheme, the adopted
criterion is based on a linear correlation between SoC and power
through the battery, but different curves (e.g. sigmoidal, stepwise)
could correlate the battery utilization algorithm.
In this case, the energy expenditure consisted of the sum of natural
gas cost to feed the FC generator and the difference of the sold and
purchased electricity from the grid. By exploiting the enhanced flex-
ibility of the systems with respect to the electricity cost profile, it was

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M. Ferraro, et al. Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

Fig. 11. Simulation result of the Benchmark B configuration. Non-fuzzy algorithm let the SoC oscillate around the 60% value regardless the possibility of exploiting
favorable electricity price variations over time.

Fig. 12. Base configuration: representation of the theoretical performance limit (i.e. energy market exploitation without grid faults) of the combined (internal
generation and fuzzy control) actions.

possible to sell energy at (on average) higher price than the purchasing
price, so that the overall transaction (for 12 days), even thanks to the FC
high conversion efficiency, resulted in a gain of 1.82€.
3.1.4. Fuzzy logic control based configurations
To assess the FL effects, different configurations were simulated. As
basic intervention, the first simulated controller, by only exploiting
information coming from weather bulletin and electricity price, de-
termined the battery/grid power flow distribution to supply the load
and, simultaneously, injecting power into the grid, if the scenario of
electricity price / fault probability / SoC is favorable (i.e. it does not affect
the system survivability in the evaluated time step).
In such “Configuration 4”, no hardware modifications were
included, so that the expected benefit roots in the exploitation of the
battery capacity to delay the load request towards time steps with low
energy price. Therefore, the expected result is a reduction of total en-
ergy cost along the 12 (typical averaged) days profile.
After assessing the basic case, to envisage if the weather forecast
contribution has impacts to the storage utilization logic, an ideal (no
grid fault) case and three different prediction effectiveness scenarios
were simulated by artificially adding the two expected grid faults in
properly selected periods:
- Ideal scenario (Configuration 5): free from grid faults to be used as
reference case for economic evaluation (reported in Fig. 13);
- Conservative scenario (Configuration 6): in “resilient” steps the

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M. Ferraro, et al.
Fig. 13. Ideal case (Configuration 5) – basic case without weather effects (i.e. no faults). Thanks to the FC generator, the battery utilization is extremely reduced (i.e.
to anticipate or delay load peak toward a low price time step). The SoC span is contained in a quite narrow band. This help to maximize the battery lifetime.
system re-charge the battery regardless the energy price up to 80%
(visible in Fig. 14);
- Pessimistic scenario (Configuration 7): two grid faults in two
“normal” time steps, this means that the grid fault prediction fails (as
in the plots of Fig. 15);
- Optimistic scenario (Configuration 8): two grid faults in two “re-
silient” time steps, this means that the grid fault prediction succeeds
(presented in Fig. 16).
Initially, to isolate the weather prediction contribution, the price
variation influence was excluded by imposing that, during the resilient
time steps, the control system acts to re-charge the batteries up to a SoC
value threshold (70% in the simulated logic, to target a sufficient ca-
pacity margin to provide grid services during “normal” time steps).
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Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
Fig. 14. Conservative case (configuration 6): each resilient
step triggers the battery recharge. The storage acts as a UPS
system that prepares itself for the expected grid fault. The
heavily indented period at the beginning is due to the first
battery charge to the 80% SoC threshold during the quite ra-
pidly intermittent wind speed measuring.
However, from the storage exploitation point of view, this choice ap-
pears quite conservative with respect to the energy trading capability of
the system. This is because, excluding the energy price from the charge/
discharge algorithm, the system will not be able to benefit from price
variations in the power exchange through the grid.
Such scenario is reported in Fig. 12, in which the power through the
grid equals the load to FC generation discrepancy.
The overall effect of such hybrid combination determined a natural
gas (overall) cost of about 47 €, that (by trading the exceeding/required
power through the grid) determines an overall gain of 1.82 € in the 12
days considered.
3.1.5. Optimized FL control and FC integration (Configuration 9)
Finally, to determine the potential combined effect of the two
M. Ferraro, et al. Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

Fig. 15. Pessimistic case (Configuration 7): the fault events were artificially set in two “normal” periods to emphasize the importance of fault prediction rooting in
weather conditions. The expected income from energy market is reduced by 6.72% with respect to the ideal (i.e. no grid faults) case.

Fig. 16. Optimistic case (Configuration 8): the fault events were artificially set in two “resilient” periods to emphasize the importance of fault prediction rooting in
weather conditions. The expected income from energy market is reduced by 5.19% with respect to the ideal (i.e. no grid faults) case.

contributions (i.e. FC generator and FL), the last simulation was char-
acterized by the right prediction of the two events and the additional
effect of price variation. Under the right prediction hypothesis, a more
daring exploitation (whose behavior is reported in Fig. 17) in the “re-
silient” state steps, the battery was operated, in comparison with the
“normal” state steps:
- Reducing the discharging rate, if the “normal” FLM output results in
a discharging flow;
- Increasing the charging rate, if the “normal” FLM output results in a
charging flow.
Due to the fuzzy logic process, this was implemented by increasing
the sensitivity of the inference engine to the “weather” signal in the first
layer FLM, whose direct implication is an increment of the “resilient”
time step occurrences.
In other words, this is equivalent to change the weights of the
weather components (i.e. the first layer FLM input variables), and so
reducing the number of “resilient” steps. Rigorously, this assumption
depends on the plant installation site, since it is equivalent to claim that
the grid faults are mostly (or more often) determined by the wind in-
tensity instead of the rain intensity (or vice versa).
However, to compensate this more dynamic logic, once restored the
grid after fault, the battery was re-charged to a higher value (80% in the
simulated case) to help the plant survival in case of a second grid in-
terruption in the short term.

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M. Ferraro, et al.
Fig. 18. Expected system behavior (battery only supplied net load) during the emergency state (grid failure): the battery fruitfully operates a load following function,
so that the fuel cell generator can be operated at its nominal working point (2.66kW).
3.1.6. Energy cost comparison: expected reduction of income loss
At the end of each simulation, the energy transition/transaction was
accounted to determine (i.e. sum) the total cost/gain over 12 (monthly-
typical) days. Indeed, since the electrical energy unit price (c€/kWh) to
the end user includes both the energy price, indirect costs (i.e. con-
tractual commitments, dispatch service cost, and so on), and taxes, only
the (net) electricity cost was considered. This is because the other price
components depend on the agreement/contract between the DSO (or
energy authority) and the “active user”.
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Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
Fig. 17. Optimistic case with daring control logic
(Configuration 9) - beside the right prediction of grid faults, to
emphasize the importance of accurate forecast (i.e. reduced
number of false positive alert) to have enough confidence to
use the battery to exchange power through the grid (with rates
biased toward the battery capacity conservation) even during
the “resilient” steps.
To implement the simulation with consistent data, some public
Italian databases were consulted:
- [32] to retrieve weather conditions with hourly (or sub-hourly) re-
cording frequency (close to the prototype installation site);
- [33] as Italian energy (day-ahead) market Authority for national
and regional (hourly based) price;
- [34] to evaluate the disconnection time over the year (65 h in total,
2 h the maximum duration on the transmission line; 199 min over
M. Ferraro, et al. Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207

Fig. 19. (a): Forced grid failure and restoration time observation. Due to the high SoC in emergency state, the controller triggers a slow limitation of the FC power
generation to avoid system lock due to battery saturation/overcharge. Once grid recovery, the controller forces the battery to reach the preset SoC value (70%) to
restore the usual service level as energy reserve. (b): the fuel cell power generation and its modulation during in case of persisting grid fault during low power load
period; to appreciate the limited dynamics of the power generation variation (SOFC system), the plot highlights a portion of the overall observation window only.

the LV distribution lines on the average of the last 10 years in Si-
cily).
However, since Sicily ranks the 2nd place among Italian regions
about “bad served users” (i.e. about 30% of the users have LV grid
disconnection time above the national average), so that to apply a
caution margin to the carried out study, the total grid time interruption
was doubled in the simulations. Moreover, despite needing for re-
presenting 6.4 events (average South Italy scenario, 2017 for long and
short supply interruption), due to the interest focused only on weather
correlated disconnections, the disruptive events were concentrated in
two of the simulated “typical day” profiles, characterized by higher
wind speed and rain fall rate values.
Under these hypotheses, the numerical simulations were used to
determine the loss with respect to the base (i.e. no grid faults) case.
3.2. System response to grid fault: emergency state verification
To verify the correct implementation of the desired behavior from
the disruptive event to the complete service recovery (after the grid
restoration), a 40 min long disconnection was simulated. To avoid too
optimistic working conditions, that disconnection was forced in a
“normal” time step, while both grid, fuel cell, and battery were sup-
plying the load; so that (without grid contribution) the battery only had
to support the load following service. After the forced event, as reported
in Fig. 18, the battery power matches net load profile. Thus, when the
load power demand is greater (lower) than the internal generation, the
battery SoC decreases (increases). In particular, in the reported case,
when the net load power crosses the 0W, it is possible to envisage the
minimum SoC value occurred in the simulation.
Analogously, to study the restoration time of the system, a very long
disconnection was simulated. In particular, along the real net load
profile, the disconnection was forced in a low load period and trig-
gering the event with a high SoC value. This choice implies two results:

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M. Ferraro, et al.
- Verifying the FC generator modulation in the emergency state (once
intersecting 80% SoC, with hysteresis down to 70%), as visible in
the green dashed section in Fig. 19. This avoided that the SoC in-
creasing rate did not add risk of system block due to the battery
saturation;
- Measuring the expected service restoration time when the battery
has quite high SoC, so that the battery must be discharged before
being again ready to operate as a distribution system operator re-
serve (with a sufficient intervention band, i.e. available capacity).
As visible in Fig. 17, with a prolonged low load power profile and
80% SoC at the end of the grid fault, the restoration time was about
4.5 h.
Furthermore, the system controller may act an opposite intervention
(light blue block in Fig. 3 not simulated in this work) to react in the
inverse case i.e. SoC reaches very low values (during the emergency
state), so that the cooling system switches off until overcome the grid
disconnection, to further reduce IT equipment out-of-service state.
4. Conclusions
A storage system control strategy set was analyzed to evaluate both
the potential benefit coming from an appropriate exploitation of the
energy market price variation over time, with different system topolo-
gies (pure batteries, pure fuel cell, hybrid) and the achievable resilient
behavior of the system against weather related grid faults (and service
down-time). This was pursued by fuzzy logic based controller (to en-
hance the battery utilization for energy trading without diminishing the
service availability to the user) and adding an internal generation
source. This last choice, acting as an (high efficiency) extra capacity
allows more flexibility while using the batteries to exchange power
with the grid and a longer survival time (i.e. reduced SoC variation
during the fault period) of the system/service.
Moreover, the simulations permitted to envisage the importance of
correct faults predictions. In particular, excluding contractual penalties
and wasted payload, the algorithm demonstrated a reduction from
6.7% to about 2.0% of the income loss (with respect to the ideal case of
continuous grid presence) while comparing the wrong forecast predic-
tion and the correct forecast prediction with enhanced weather sensi-
tivity, without losing system survival capability.
After this, the algorithm behavior was verified during and im-
mediately after the disruptive event, by demonstrating the expected
“load following” function by the battery and the correct behavior of the
system controller during the restoration transient, until the battery SoC
reached the center of its desired working band (70%) after prolonged
grid fault.
The developed algorithm allow to identify the proper size of the
electrochemical storage (even as hybrid system) for the dual use UPS/
Grid support as well as to provide auxiliary services for the power
networks to achieve additional benefits to the DSO dispatch service and
study the overall resiliency of the power network itself. During the
emergency period, the control algorithm performed even the desired FC
power modulation to cope with the highly increasing battery SoC (80%
uppermost threshold) and avoiding the risk of battery overcharge and
system blocking.
The model/algorithm will be further developed including cost and
environmental evaluation.
The implementation of a distributed architecture with different
production/storage/service sites (and so characterized by different
weather forecast and grid failure occurrence frequencies, durations, and
causes) has been adopted in a real site. The control logic will be tested
in a second site for accuracy evaluation and model validation. The re-
sults will be presented in a later work.
15
Journal of Energy Storage 28 (2020) 101207
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The presented research activity has been supported by the “Fondo
per il finanziamento delle attività di ricerca e di sviluppo di interesse
generale per il sistema elettrico nazionale - Accordo di Programma
CNR-Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico – Piano Triennale 2015-
2017”
Supplementary materials
Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in
the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.est.2020.101207.
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