Smoothing Methodologies for Photovoltaic Power Fluctuations

The escalation of energy demand causes increasing power generation resources. So Worldwide there is a challenge to meet this demand with clean resources. Despite that photovoltaic panels (PV) and wind farms represents a great solution, many voltage and power issues occur. Nevertheless, integrating an energy storage system (ESS) with a smoothing filter yields a smoothed dispatched power into the grid that complies with the grid code. This work introduces using a moving median (MM) filter to solve the issue of power lagging while smoothing the solar power fluctuations and evaluates its smoothing performance with different smoothing methodologies namely; low pass filtering (LPF) and moving average (MA) filter. Results clarify that a smoother dispatched power could be performed with longer time constant and bigger window size in both LPF and MA techniques, but a delay between the smoothed and the original data will happen which requires a bigger battery capacity. On the other hand, using moving median suppress the other methodologies with better smoothing performance and good power tracking.