Impact the expansion of the production of generation of solar power on the low voltage network in Egypt

Abstract

Nowadays, in Egypt the power electricity demand is increasing continuously and rampant power cuts are a norm, and the scheduled outages can be as high as 8 hours a day in some parts of the country. During the outages, industries, commercial establishments and residential consumers tend to use diesel generators, which not only expensive, but also leads to pollution. One of the main tasks for The Egyptian government is to generate electricity from renewable energy sources to overcome this increase in the energy consumption and at the same time reduce environmental impact of power generation New technologies allow the electricity to be generated in small sized plants. Large scale integration of distributed generators at either LV or MV is at the present the trend followed in power systems to cover the supply of some loads. These generators are of considerable smaller size than the traditional generators. So importance of Installation of renewable energy such as roof top solar photovoltaic will be increase. Roof top solar projects are a known phenomenon nowadays. These PV systems offer a great opportunity for institutions, industries, and all other buildings already using UPS, inverters, batteries and diesel generators to reduce energy costs and to ensure power continuity in the event of grid unavailability Integration of roof-top solar PV is suitable for use at the low voltage (LV) level in Egypt where integration can meet residential consumers' needs. So, governments must encourage households to build a sustainable climate-friendly society for the future and give incentives to the individual owners. These small scale rooftop PV (RTPV) systems have some very obvious advantages, such that, No additional land that could be used for other purposes is required for rooftop PV systems, Huge savings in the Transmission and Distribution losses (TDL), In the other side the uncontrolled and intermittent characteristic of solar PV which causes voltage fluctuation within the network and this is significant in the single phase PV system connection. Also, phase unbalance, loading on the distribution transformer, power factor, reactive power compensation, and harmonics is expected to have greater impacts on distribution network. And are the key influences at the point of PV connection that affects the power quality of the distribution network. So, this paper discuss The key major barriers to the integration of roof-top solar PV systems which are the uncertainties in the performance of the low voltage distribution network due to the intermittent nature of solar PV sources. also, a model was developed to investigate the potential technical impacts of integrating roof-top solar PV systems into the low voltage distribution network in Egypt and the uncertainties such as voltage fluctuations, phase unbalance, distribution transformer overloading, reactive power compensation, harmonic injections that detract the overall power quality of the typical distribution subtropical climate. Furthermore, the impacts of solar PV on low voltage distribution network where loads connected through distribution transformer and finally further investigation was conducted with the deployment of energy storage into the respective load centers.