Voltage Quality and Power Factor Improvement in Smart Grids Using Controlled DG Units

Abstract

The increased penetration of renewable energy sources in the electrical grid, due to the rapid increase of power demand and the need of diverse energy sources, has made distributed generation (DG) units an essential part of the modern electrical grid. The integration of many DG units in smart grids requires control and coordination between them, and the grid to maximize the benefits of the DG units. Smart grids and modern electronic devices require high standards of power quality, especially voltage quality. In this paper, a new methodology is presented to improve the voltage quality and power factor in smart grids. This method depends on using voltage variation and admittance values as inputs of a controller that controls the reactive power generation in all DG units. The results show that the controller is efficient in improving the voltage quality and power factor. Real data from an electrical network have been used in the simulation model in MATLAB Simulink to test the new approach.

Keywords

• voltage quality
• power factor
• smart grids
• distributed generation
• renewable energy
• power quality