Performance evaluation of Renewable Energy Sources based grid connected system considering Unified Power Flow Controller

Abstract

The quality of power is a major concern for the utilities and the power industries. Since the 1980’s, the term power quality has become a very prevalent one. There are various factors that affect the power quality, such as sag, swell, and power factor variation. The main cause of these issues is the use of non-linear loads. In a RES based grid-connected system, harmonics variation is one of the main issues that can affect the quality of power. Hence to address this in this paper Unified Power Flow Controller (UPFC) is proposed for the grid connected system. Many papers were proposed with the various FACTS devices but the performance of the proposed system exhibits a better one. In this paper application of UPFC is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink on test cases of wind-based grid connected system and PV based grid connected system. The performance of the proposed UPFC is compared with conventional Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). In all the cases the proposed UPFC exhibits the improved performance. This ensures the reduction in the harmonics in the power system in future.