Power quality improvement of distribution system with photovoltaic and permanent magnet synchronous generator based renewable energy farm using static synchronous compensator

Abstract

This paper presents power quality improvement for effective power transfer in a grid-integrated solar photovoltaic-wind energy hybrid system. The hybrid system constitutes a renewable energy farm, based on photovoltaic energy generation system and wind energy conversion system. The system experiences frequent disturbances in AC loads and power output from the renewable farm. This creates reactive power mismatch and raises voltage instability and power quality issues. This gap can be eliminated using an adjustable reactive power source i.e. static synchronous compensator. Three case scenarios of the hybrid system, i.e. hybrid system in (I) standalone mode, (II) grid-integrated mode and (III) grid-integrated mode with STATCOM, are tested to compare their dynamic and transient performances. Results show that scenario-III best fulfilled the dynamic compensation requirement among all cases. Under this scenario, load bus voltage is regulated at around 1.0 p.u. and total harmonic distortion in voltages/currents are maintained at around 1%. Furthermore, this scenario demonstrated superior transient response towards a step change in reactive power load, significantly reducing maximum peak deviation by 73.4% and settling time by 75% in load voltage compared to the worst case of scenario-I.