A Study on Various Conditions Impacting the Harmonics at Point of Common Coupling in On-Grid Solar Photovoltaic Systems

Abstract

Renewable penetration, particularly the increasing deployment of PV by residential customers, organizations, and utilities, is leading to the rapid evolution of the power grid. However, the power system’s architectural changes affect the quality of supply and give rise to power quality issues such as harmonics, fluctuations, disturbances, etc., at the point of common coupling (PCC). Therefore, in this work, a power network was modeled to study the impact of PV systems on PCC. At first, a detailed review is presented for on-grid PV systems with different inverter topologies, control techniques, sources of harmonic generation, and their mitigation strategies. After that, several use cases considering various sources of harmonics in a network with on-grid PV are modeled and simulated using MATLAB/Simulink. In-depth research was performed in this work to examine the many variables that affect harmonics, such as solar radiation levels, controller tuning, and load changes. Results with a real-time simulation platform (OPAL-RT) are presented in this paper for several use cases. Lastly, comprehensive discussions are presented from the acquired offline and real-time simulation results.