Solving Issues of Grid Integration of Solar and Wind Energy Models by Using a Novel Power Flow Algorithm

Abstract

A major research is ongoing on grid integration and issues of renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, fuel cells, etc. As the renewable energy sources are geographically widely spread and of low capacity, they can be integrated to distribution networks. The distribution networks are unbalanced, and they experience voltage unbalance (VU). Therefore, instead of per-phase analysis methods, three-phase power flow methods are required to solve these networks. This chapter proposes a three-phase power flow algorithm (PFA) for unbalanced radial distribution networks (URDN) with multiple integrations of solar and wind models. Both PV and PQ models of solar and wind energy sources are effectively incorporated into three-phase PFA. The accuracy of the three-phase PFA without integrations of solar and wind energy models is tested on IEEE-13 bus test feeder. Several case studies are carried on IEEE-13 bus and IEEE-34 bus feeders with the multiple integrations of both PQ and PV models of solar and wind energy generation. The test results show that the proposed three-phase PFA can effectively handle these integrations, and overall energy saving, reduced power loss, improved voltage profile, and reduced severity of VU problem are achieved.