A Survey of Systems to Integrate Distributed Energy Resources and Energy Storage on the Utility Grid

Renewable distributed energy resources (DERs) will play a large role in the future energy infrastructure because of advantages like lower carbon imprints, lower fuel costs, and reduced power flows on transmission lines. The unreliability of many renewable DERs due to the intermittent nature of their supply, especially in the case of solar and wind generators, can be mitigated with energy storage that brings a host of additional benefits including load leveling, frequency control, and power quality compensation. One barrier to adoption of these technologies is the need for interfaces between the different voltage levels and waveforms produced by the various systems. This paper, which is tutorial in nature, examines several possible interfaces presented in the literature and provides a comparison between their advantages and disadvantages.