Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Sources with Power Quality Improvement

Abstract

Global electrical energy consumption is steadily increasing and there is a necessity to increase the power generation capacity. Conventional power generation schemes have serious environmental issues like climate change, high oil price, and water and oil pollution. These issues are the major drive for the search for new sustainable energy sources. The solution to this problem could be renewable energy sources, which provide significant percentage of required installed capacity addition and also eliminate the harmful emissions from the conventional power generation sources. The availability of renewable energy sources are completely based on daily and seasonal patterns. But the power required by the consumers could have very different characteristics than renewable energy sources. Therefore, it would be very difficult to operate a power system installed with only renewable generation units due to the characteristic differences and the high uncertainty of the availability of the renewable sources. The way of fully exploiting the renewable energy is by grid connection, normally at distribution level. The introduction of renewable energy source to the distribution system will have a significant impact on the customers and utility equipments. The utility is concerned due to high penetration level of renewable energy sources in distribution systems as it may pose threat to power system in terms of stability, voltage regulation and power quality issues. The recent developments in interfacing of renewable energy source to distribution supply (grid) have been proposed with shunt active filter which can simultaneously compensate for problems like power factor correction, current unbalance and current harmonics and also inject energy generated by renewable energy power sources to grid with a very low THD. Even when there is no energy available from the power source (when there is no sun or wind) the shunt active filter can still operate, improving the power quality of the electric grid. ...