Design, control and operation of universal power converter for interfacing storage-enabled renewable energy to power grid under source outage

Abstract

Harnessing energy from renewable sources is becoming the need of the hour, in order to reduce carbon emissions. The net zero transition can be achieved only when all the major energy consuming sectors move towards decarbonization. As electric vehicles are becoming popular, immediate measures to harness energy locally are needed so that the power grid is not overloaded. Therefore, we propose a universal power converter in this study, which can interface different renewable energy sources with power grid along with energy storage. The sources are considered with respect to the Indian scenario, which includes solar photovoltaic system and battery based energy storage apart from the grid supply. This proposed converter also has the ability to operate in stand-alone mode when power grid is suffering outage, which is not uncommon in developing countries. We further investigate the operation of the proposed converter in different modes wherein either PV or battery are unavailable.