Abstract
Rising electricity consumption, rapid depletion of fossil fuels, and the global shift to the use of renewable energy resources have increased the need to integrate renewable and distributed energy resources (DERs), such as solar photovoltaic (PV) to power distribution networks. In this paper, the effect of photovoltaic system inverter scalability on reactive power compensation/absorption in a modified IEEE 13-node distribution network is studied. Power flow analyzes were conducted in MATLAB / SIMULINK software for different operating conditions to show the effect of reactive power on network voltage regulation, total harmonic distortion (THD) reduction, and power factor conservation in order to improve the system's power handling capacity. The result shows that the use of the PV system (500 kW) in Bus (671) led to a decrease in the generated power of the generator by 13.79%, the use of reactive power injection from the inverter of the photovoltaic system on site improved the voltage profile significantly. Also, the voltage distortion (THD-V) was reduced by 34% when injected with reactive power, and the current distortion (THD-I) was reduced by 57.65% when the reactive power was absorbed, and the power factor was improved on site.
