A NOVEL PSO TECHNIQUE FOR REACTIVE POWER CONTROL IN PV GRID SYSTEM

Grid tied solar inverters are designed to generate power at unity power factor which means that they have capability to produce active power only. The reactive power requirement of the load is catered by grid only. With the suddenly increase in the deployment of renewable based Distributed Energy Resources, reactive power drawn from the grid as compared to active power has increased considerably. The objective of this project is to present a local controller of reactive power to comply the new requirements asked by the transmission system operators despite the variation of ambient conditions without using extra devices. For this purpose, this project proposes a Particle Swarm Optimization Control for PV inverter to mitigate the system voltage fluctuations. Also, the method considers the loss associated with the reactive power production. Simulations are presented to assess the voltage regulation characteristics under different load conditions.