Hardware in the Loop Simulation for Renewable Energy Resources

The accelerated pace of electrification expands the need for clean, renewable energy. Integrating distributed energy resources into the grid often demand complex control solutions which require extensive development time and testing. Using a model-based design approach can significantly reduce the time and costs of the development process. This paper shows the workflow used to implement a hardware in the loop simulation, tailored for renewable energy resources, using the MATLAB product family and an off-the-shelf FPGA development board. A photovoltaic generator is used to exemplify the process, from system modeling to HDL code generation and real-time simulation. The HDL model’s accuracy was first validated using an FPGA in the loop simulation, and then tested in real-time, in a hardware in the loop setup, where an average error of $4.0779 \%$ against the simulated model was obtained.