Poster Abstract: Software Defined Battery-Solar Systems

Consumer battery installations are isolated, physical devices that are unable to participate in today's energy markets or other grid services outside what their vendor provides. Our recent work [5] describes a software system that manages multiple, networked battery energy storage systems in the electric grid. The system introduces two new ideas that enable flexible and dependable management of energy storage. The first is a virtual battery, which can either partition a battery or aggregate multiple batteries. The second is a reservation-based API, which allows dependable, asynchronous control of batteries to meet contractual guarantees. This software system treats batteries as a single entity rather than as part of an integrated battery-solar system. As a result, batteries used in this software system charge/discharge at the exact rate specified by the system. Software management of multiple batteries within integrated battery-solar systems provides a new set of challenges that have not been addressed in prior work. We propose implementing a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller to ensure that aggregate batteries maintain their desired outputs even with variable solar power from the integrated batterysolar systems.