Hybrid energy storage solutions through battery-supercapacitor integration in photovoltaic installations

Batteries integrated into renewable energy storage systems may experience multiple irregular charge and discharge cycles due to the variability of photovoltaic energy production characteristics or load fluctuations. This could negatively impact the battery’s longevity and lead to an increase in project costs. This article presents an approach for the sharing of embedded energy between the battery, which serves as the main energy storage system, and the supercapacitors (SC), which act as an auxiliary energy storage system. By delivering or absorbing peak currents according to the load requirements, supercapacitors increase the lifespan of batteries and reduce their stresses. An maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm regulates the connection of the photovoltaic (PV) cells to the DC bus through a boost converter. A buck-boost converter connects supercapacitors and batteries to the DC bus. A DC-AC converter connects the inductive load to the DC bus. The system regulates static converters connected to batteries and supercapacitors based on current. An energy management block supervises the system components. We implement the entire system in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. We present the simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy for the entire system.