High-Current Winding for SMES Cable and Its System Configuration for Photovoltaic Power Transmission

The use of electricity generated from renewable energy sources is essential for a carbon-neutral society, and countermeasures against their severe output power fluctuations are key to this. In our previous studies, we proposed a superconducting cable with energy storage function (SMES cable) as such a countermeasure and successfully demonstrated its function using a small model cable (with a current capacity of the order of 100 A) and a simple circuit model (with photovoltaic assumed by a voltage source) based on a hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS). In this study, a kA-class model cable was fabricated by parallel winding of a REBCO coated conductor, and a HILS-based experiment showed that the cable could be regarded just as an inductance with negligible loss. Furthermore, it was found that the application of SMES cable to photovoltaic power transmission could maximize the output power from the photovoltaic while reducing its fluctuation by appropriately combining a DC-DC converter and the current-voltage level of the photovoltaic array.