An Adaptive Regulatory Approach to Improve the Power Quality in Solar PV-Integrated Low-Voltage Utility Grid

Abstract

Solar PV-connected distributed utility grid often faces several issues due to variable penetration of the generated power. It creates frequent disturbance in load side and increases the voltage instability. It is a great challenge to maintain the stability at distributed low-voltage grid and improve the quality of power. In order to overcome this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive voltage and current regulatory approach to improve the power quality in a solar PV-integrated low-voltage utility grid. It supplies auto-adjustable reactive power during the small and large voltage deviations in the grid. The proposed approach assures that the load bus voltage is maintained at 1 p.u. under variable environmental conditions. In addition, the power quality gets improved by injecting the power with improved quality. Three cases of standalone mode, grid-connected modes with and without STATCOM have been investigated and reported in this paper. To validate the proposed adaptive voltage and current regulatory approach, the dynamic results of regulated grid voltage under poor environmental conditions are analyzed and the measured results are presented in this paper. Furthermore, the obtained results are evaluated with the existing approaches such as BAT, firefly and elephant herding optimization (EHO) algorithms and reported in this paper.