Powerline communication (PLC) on HVDC bus in a renewable energy system

The management of the distribution of electrical energy generated from renewable sources such as solar and wind is a technology keylock to improve the performance and the stability of the overall energy transfer processes. Thus, researches on power lines used as communication supports are very promising for managing small and medium powered generator systems, which are not initially designed in a dependability approach. Additionally, this new possibilities of management allows improving the performance and the stability in the overall energy transfer process. The present study is particularly orientated to distributed architecture for managing parallel photovoltaic and/or wind sensors connected to high voltage DC (HVDC) bus and communication using power-line as communication vector (PLC). The PLC system using the modulation technique, allows the monitoring and information transfer concerning the local delivered powers and their variations, together with all information (temperature, shading area,.) necessary to optimize the energy production. Then, the aim of this work is the study of PLC solutions designed for working with HVDC bus especially for its integration in a global renewable energy system. The so-developed PLC circuits will be thus considered as interfaces between smart DC-DC converters and the HVDC bus. They will be based on a hardware part constituted by a transceiver integrating a modulation-demodulation interface with the HVDC bus and a signal processor able to operate the treatment of various information exchanged from and to the input sensors. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.