Battery energy storage system for peak shaving and voltage unbalance mitigation

Over the last decade, the battery energy storage system (BESS) has become one of the important components in smart grid for enhancing power system performance and reliability. This paper presents a strategy to shave the peak demand and mitigate the voltage unbalance of the electrical networks using a BESS. The BESS is developed to reduce the peak demand and consequently the electricity bill of customers. With the foreseeable large use of BESS, the stress of utility companies can be reduced during high peak power demands. BESS is also equipped with the ability to mitigate voltage unbalance of the network. This indirectly improves the efficiency which in turn, prolongs the life span of three phase machines. The proposed strategy to control BESS has been developed by using the LabVIEW graphical programming software. An experimental test bed has been setup at the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) campus to evaluate the performance of the system. The experimental results show that the BESS can effectively restrict the power demand from exceeding the pre-determined value and suppress the voltage unbalance factor within the recommended value.