Power management of stand‐alone photovoltaic (PV) systems with centralised dc bus is usually performed using centralised algorithms based on complex state machines. This study proposes an intuitive and modular solution using a price‐based approach. The dc bus is considered a market environment where a fictitious energy price is defined according to energy scarcity. The converters that connect the PV generator, loads, and energy storages to the dc bus choose their operation modes in response to the price. The proposed approach was applied to a stand‐alone PV system with energy storage. Advantages of the proposed technique are scalability and intuitive programming effort due to the market analogy, so it may be helpful to developers of off‐grid PV systems. Experimental results have been carried out to validate the proposed approach, proved effective to manage this system.

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