Wind energy harvesting control for green cellphone towers with dSPACE implementation

Abundance of renewable energy sources at the location of cellphone antennas and the high cost of grid expansion to remote areas provide economic incentives for development of green cellphone towers. At the height of 15-60 meter, these towers experience a semi steady flow of air suitable to generate electric power. However, some technical challenges and sizing procedures need to be addressed when powering up the sensitive telecommunication loads with intermittent wind power. This paper provides the proper sizing procedure for electrical components used in a wind powered green cellphone tower. In addition, a supervisory control unit is designed and used to provide a high performance power delivery to the tower's electric loads. A small-scale system is implemented with dSPACE hardware to experimentally demonstrate the performance of supervisory controller.