Design of a novel mode-based energy storage controller for residential PV systems

This paper presents a novel mode-based controller design approach to control energy storage devices (ESDs) for residential PV applications. Different from the traditional controller design approach, the mode-based approach assumes that an ESD is equipped with a set of predetermined real-time control modes. Thus, the control objective becomes choosing the best operation mode of the ESD to achieve the best performance at the lowest cost instead of the charging and discharging power levels. As a result, a two-stage algorithm is developed. In the first stage, an economic model predictive control (EMPC) algorithm is used to determine the optimal charging or discharging power. In the second stage, based on the EMPC result, the controller eliminates unsuitable modes and selects the best operation modes among the suitable modes. Residential electricity consumption data collected in the PECAN Street Project are used for testing and validation of the proposed algorithms. Simulation results show that the performance of the mode-based controller is robust and consistent across different residential load patterns.