Agent-based energy management and control of a grid-connected wind/solar hybrid power system

Stability of wind/solar hybrid power system plays an important role in the quality of power grid. In this paper, a grid-connected wind/solar hybrid power system is proposed. It contains four subsystems: wind turbine generation, solar photovoltaic (PV), storage batteries and loads. Each of them is connected to the AC bus or DC bus. The energy management and control system is implemented by a programmable logic controller (PLC). Four operation modes, i.e., ready, stand by, run, stop, are defined. It employs agent-based cooperative control strategy to achieve maximum power point tracking (MPPT) of wind turbine and photovoltaic, and the system runs under optimal operation condition. Experiments show that this system can runs under either grid-connected mode or stand-alone mode. It has a kindly graphical user interface (GUI) and high performance.