PV output power smoothing using flywheel storage system

A large penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) characterizes the next generation power grid. Yet the intermittent nature of such resources introduces new challenges in the power grid. In this paper, we explore the employment of flywheels to smooth the output power of a fluctuating energy resource. We introduce an energy management approach that is based on moving average (MA) and linear programming (LP) to optimize the operation of the flywheel storage system to smooth the output of a PV system. The MA is tracked to reduce the fluctuation whereas optimization is used to find the optimal charging and discharging periods that takes into consideration the production forecast. The results demonstrate the ability of the approach to mitigate the output power fluctuation of a photovoltaic system.