Building Integrated Photovoltaic System With Energy Storage and Smart Grid Communication

The utility grid challenge is to meet the current growing energy demand. One solution to this problem is to expand the role of microgrids that interact with the utility grid and operate independently in case of a limited availability during peak time or outage. This paper proposes, for urban areas, a building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) primarily for self-feeding of buildings equipped with PV array and storage. With an aim of elimination of multiple energy conversions, a DC network distribution is considered. The BIPV can supply a tertiary building at the same time as PV array may produce power through a hierarchical supervision able to exchange messages with the smart grid and metadata. The hierarchical control is designed as an interface to expand the system ability for advanced energy management control having regard to the grid availability and user´s commands. It consists of four layers: human-machine interface, prediction, cost management, and operation. The operation layer, implemented in an experimental platform, takes into account the grid supply power limits and constrains the DC load. The experimental results validate the approach that may be a solution for the future smart grid communication between BIPV and utility grid.