Grid connection of wave energy converter in heaving mode operation by supercapacitor storage technology

European energy policy guidelines recognise renewable energy sources the main mean to contrast the rapid fossil fuels depletion and the related global warming. Marine energy source represents an attractive and inexhaustible reservoir from which to draw. One of the major difficulties in integrating sea wave generation systems or equivalently wave energy converters (WECs) with existing electrical systems is the management of their generation intermittency. This is essentially due to the inherent nature of the sea wave source. Energy storage represents an effective enabling technology for mitigating such an effect. To this aim, this study proposes an efficient control strategy for embedded floating buoy generation systems with energy storage technologies in order to regularise the injected grid power while minimising the contractual power established by the distribution system operator. The control strategy has been tested numerically on a grid connected DC microgrid formed by a DC bus at which a floating buoy generation system is interfaced with an energy storage system, supercapacitors-based, having the purpose of smoothing the natural power fluctuations of the WEC.