Hosting capacity enhancement of renewable-based distributed generation in harmonically polluted distribution systems using passive harmonic filtering

Abstract

In spite of being economically viable for numerous applications, renewable energy cannot realise its true penetration potential until some of the barriers are not tackled with excellence. Such barriers are harmonic distortion, distribution cable’s ampacity and voltage rise limits, those put bound on the maximum allowable penetration level of renewable energy. This paper formulates the enhancement of power quality-constrained hosting capacity (HC) as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem under several constraints of system’s performance indices (PIs). The considered performance indices are individual order and total harmonic distortion in the line current and point of common coupling (PCC)’s voltage, load power factor (PF), distribution line’s ampacity and steady-state voltage profile. In the formulated multi-objective optimization model, an optimal design of a third-order damped filter and size of the distributed generation (DG) unit is simultaneously determined for achieving maximum hosting capacity and power factor at the PCC while keeping system’s other indices such as total voltage harmonic distortion (TVHD) and total filter cost (FC) incurred at a minimum by obtaining a best-compromised solution using the newly proposed Pareto-based multi-objective firefly algorithm (MOFA). The extension of the multi-objective firefly algorithm is considered for producing the Pareto optimal front and various conclusions are drawn by analysing the trade-offs among the objectives by plotting the same on different 2-axis planes. The optimization efficiency and superiority of the proposed multi-objective firefly algorithm based hosting capacity enhancement approach is validated by comparing the results with those obtained by popular multi-objective PSO (MOPSO) and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) under similar objectives. Also, the results of the proposed methodology are compared with those achieved from one of the most recently introduced hosting capacity enhancement approaches in literature. Eventually, the impacts of different background voltage distortion (BVD) levels and load-side’s nonlinearity levels (NLLs) on filter performance, particularly filter cost as well as enhanced hosting capacity, are analysed and various conclusions are drawn.