A Module-Based Hierarchical Microgrid with a Bottom-Up Building Architecture for Rural Electrification

Abstract

In this paper, a module-based hierarchical microgrid (MG) architecture is proposed to help rural electrification. It provides a bottom-up way to form a MG with multilayer expandability. The proposed MG overcomes the drawback of conventional MG that requires high upfront cost and long leading time. It provides an organic way to form a MG that allows user to scale up the system while the demands growing, which can fully utilize the existing resources. The proposed MG is expandable on different layers that can meet requirements of customers with all power consumption levels. The proposed architecture is based on power unit. Each unit, which contains PV generation and energy storage, can work as a standalone solar home system. Multiple units can be connected as a group to scale up the local power supply. Groups can be interconnected through a public bus with gateway converters to form a community network, which can supply public usages and enables power exchange among the households. A fully decentralized communication-less control method is also proposed to achieve plug-n-play. Detailed design, analysis and implementation of the proposed module-based MG is provided in this paper. Simulation and preliminary experiment results have been provided to verify the concept and analytical study.