Integration and Decentralized Control of Standalone Solar Home Systems for Off-Grid Community Applications

Photovoltaic solar home systems (SHSs) provide a cost-effective solution for the limited electrification of remote off-grid communities. However, due to their standalone nature, the benefit of usage diversity cannot be extracted. In this paper, we present the power electronic interface along with the decentralized control scheme for the integration of standalone SHSs for driving community load applications. Power electronic interface consists of an isolated boost converter capable support dc bus integration, thereby it formulates a dc microgrid through the interconnection of multiple standalone SHSs. Power aggregation is achieved through decentralized controlled resource sharing based upon the resource availability and installed capacity in the individual solar home system. To ensure cost affordability and to avoid the deployment of any communication infrastructure, modified I-V droop control is designed for the intended application. Thereby, power aggregation through the proposed power electronic interface and its decentralized control allows us to extract the benefit of usage diversity and drive high power community power loads at a village scale. The overall schematic is simulated using MATLAB and scaled down model is implemented on hardware. Results of power aggregation from various resource sharing scenarios are illustrated.