With the implementation of self-consumption electricity tariff in Germany and the increasing
prospects of it being implemented in many other countries, the number of PV installations on
individual rooftops has increased. With the increase in such individual power plants on
dwellings, there arises a need for robust energy measurement principles, which require more
sophisticated metering infrastructure involving smart meters with bidirectional communication
protocols. In order to make the best use of the existing grid infrastructure and to implement
peak power shaving, there is an increasing effort to implement Demand Response functions
in houses with intelligent household appliances like time flexible washing machines and
water heaters etc. These inclusions have driven the conventional homes into the Smart
category.
One such smart house consisting of Solar PV panels, Bidirectional grid feed converter
assembly, Lead acid batteries (storage), intelligent home appliances and smart meters
integrated with a demand response management software was built at VITO (The Flemish
Institute for technological research), Mol, Belgium, to carry out research on concepts like
smart grids, energy storage and Multi agent system based demand response management.
The current project’s goal is to integrate and evaluate the intelligent PV system with smart
loads in the LabVIEW environment and analyse how the individual components of the smart
house behave during a cluster test. The intelligent PV system, which is being evaluated,
consists of a PV simulator block, 3 individual converters in an assembly, Lead Acid Batteries,
a heater as a non-deferrable load and connections to the AC grid. Few logics to measure
and evaluate the energy consumption are also pondered upon.
The LabVIEW VIs were developed for heater control. The thyristor and USB voltage based
calibration was made for controlling the heater. The intermediate transformer losses were
measured and look up tables made in the LabVIEW platform for the power loss
compensation. A net zero energy consumption logic for the smart house was put to test,
which could be potentially useful, when there are multiple sources of power generation and
storage. The cluster tests resulted in giving a better understanding of the system. Some
deviations were noticed from the programmed states of operation of the Flexiva bidirectional
converter assembly. The switching ON of the deferrable load based on the availability of
power was studied from the experiments conducted under different levels of SOC of the
batteries. An interface to use a kWh pulse meter to measure the power consumption was
also developed in LabVIEW.
The smart house setup can be made to couple with (μ) CHP plants, heat pumps and
intelligent storage options with better communication interfaces in future to improve the
functionality and reliability of the smart house. |