Solar PV Plant for Improved Utilization of DG Set

Abstract

The DG (Diesel Generator) set generally operates at the low power factor due to the harmonics and reactive power demand of the loads and its voltages and currents deteriorate because of unbalanced and/or nonlinear loads. Moreover, in the existing system, the solar photovoltaic (PV) plant operates during the daytime only at unity power factor. Hence, the utilization factors of both the DG set and the solar PV plant are poor. This paper presents the use of a solar PV plant to improve the utilization of the DG set by controlling its voltage source converter (VSC). The VSC regulates its currents to reduce the flow of the reactive component currents, negative sequence currents, and harmonics currents in the DG set. In this work, an adaptive algorithm is used to filter the nonlinear load currents and perturb and observe (P& O) based tracking algorithm is used to extract the maximum power from the solar PV array. A simulation study is carried out to show the effectiveness of this work and to validate the performance of the control algorithm.