Abstract
Driven by the Energy Strategy 2050 of Denmark, renewable energy sources (RESs) are increasingly integrated into the Danish power grid. Solar photovoltaic (PV) plants play an important role in this process. This paper conducted a study to investigate the impacts of residential solar PV integration in the distribution grid on voltage security and grid loss based on the 10 kV distribution grid in Bornholm. Three case studies are performed to test three different reactive power control methods, i.e., PF(P), constant PF and constant Q, at different penetration levels. The assessment of the impacts of PV integration and different control methods are done in the DIgSILENT PowerFactory. It was found that PV integration can contribute to reducing the loss of the system, increased overvoltage in buses and overload in transformers, and 40% penetration at the low voltage is considered to be an optimal level based on the result. PF(P) control gives the best performance among all three methods under the current grid codes. With constant PF control, it was found that the system loss can be significantly reduced if the PV systems operate with a power factor of 0.9 leading, which is not the norm of the current Danish grid code.
Highlights
Solar PV power plants in Denmark are integrated into the distribution grids, most of which are installed as roof-top modules in residential areas at the low voltage (LV, 0.4 kV) level
There are studies investigating the operation at the MV level, but with PV systems integrated directly at the MV level or with systems in the small scale like IEEE multiple nodes system, or a practical local LV feeder of a few communities, or PV power plants directly connected to the MV grid
Three cases are studied corresponding to three reactive power control methods
Summary
Due to the global concern of climate change, there is an increasing demand for integrating renewable energy into power systems. Solar PV power plants in Denmark are integrated into the distribution grids, most of which are installed as roof-top modules in residential areas at the low voltage (LV, 0.4 kV) level. Energies 2019, 12, 1458 grid-like wind turbines, and LV networks are mostly located at the deep end of the distribution grids. These situations make the system operators hold doubts about having a large amount of PV systems integrated into the grid because the controllability and benefits of the PV systems are difficult to be harnessed by the operators. There are many different projects working on increasing the penetration level and utilization of PV systems [4,5]
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