Ecosense Sustainable Solutions Pvt. Ltd. installed a 5kW Grid Connected
Microgrid experimental setup at IIT Roorkee’s Electrical Engineering
Department.
A micro-grid is a localized group of electricity sources and
sinks (loads) that typically operates connected to
and synchronous with the traditional centralized grid (macro-grid), but can also disconnect and maintain operation autonomously or go completely off-grid as per
the requirement.
To understand how a Microgrid works, you first have to understand how the grid works.
A Microgrid can be powered by distributed generators, batteries, and/or renewable resources like solar panels. Depending on how it’s fueled and how its requirements are managed, a Microgrid might run indefinitely.
Ecosense’s Microgrid system is an experimental and research system. It relies on three of the popular Renewable Energy sources i.e.; Solar PV, Wind and Fuel Cell.
Instead of Actual wind turbine we are using Wind Turbine Emulator. Wind turbine emulator mimics the behaviour of wind turbine for hardware level simulations. This system has a DC motor coupled with the Induction generator, speed of which is controlled as per the speed reference calculated by solving the mathematical model of wind turbine. An induction generator is coupled to the DC motor and bidirectional inverter is connected to the terminals of the generator. Researcher can execute the mathematical models of their newly developed or modified wind turbine and can simulate the speed/power of profile of turbine on hardware environment directly for different wind speeds & pitch angle.
Similarly, instead of using Solar Panels we used Solar PV Emulator. Solar PV Emulator mimics the behaviour of Solar PV Panels for hardware level simulations. This system comprises of two DC Switch Mode Power supplies which can be programmed by user to either behave like a solar panel or a DC Power supply. User can select and program solar panels in the range of 10 Wp - 1000 Wp per channel and configure them to work in Independent or Parallel configurations to actualise a Solar PV Array. By virtue of its features it can be easily considered as a versatile Solar PV Array.
A 1 kW dry hydrogen based fuel cell is also used as one of the sources in the hybrid system.
WTE-PVE- Fuel Cell Hybrid with DC Microgrid system combines the outputs of Wind Turbine emulator, PV Emulator and Fuel Cell at a common DC link which is further connected to a three legged programmable inverter to deliver the combined power to an Actual Grid.
