Optimally smoothing output of PV farms

Abstract

The output of a PV farm can fluctuate significantly due to the fluctuating cloud cover. We consider the problem of smoothing the output of a PV farm using a battery with a moving average filter and a filter based on optimal control formulation. We provide analytical bounds on the ramp rate and battery size required to implement the moving average filter. We then show that the filter using optimal control formulation significantly outperforms the moving average filter. We compare the performance of the two filters using actual solar irradiance data.