Hierarchical Control Strategy of Heat and Power for Zero Energy Buildings including Hybrid Fuel Cell/Photovoltaic Power Sources and Plug-in Electric Vehicle

This paper presents a hierarchical control strategy for heat and electric power control of a building integrating hybrid renewable power sources including photovoltaic, fuel cell and battery energy storage with Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV) in smart distribution systems. Because of the controllability of fuel cell power, this power sources plays the main role for providing heat and electric power to zero emission buildings. First, the power flow structure between hybrid power resources is described. To do so, all necessary electrical and thermal equations are investigated. Next, due to the many complexities and uncertainties in this kind of hybrid system, a hybrid supervisory control with an adaptive fuzzy sliding power control strategy is proposed to regulate the amount of requested fuel from a fuel cell power source to produce the electrical power and heat. Then, simulation results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and capability of the proposed control strategy during different operating conditions in the utility grid. Finally, the performance of the proposed controller is verified using hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) real-time simulations carried out in OPAL-RT technologies for a real building in Tehran. The HIL results show that the proposed controller provides the proper power and heat control strategy.