Investigations on solar power grid integration and simulation

Abstract

Since the second industrial revolution in 19th century, electric power technology has played an important role in people's daily life. However, conventional power plant relies on fossil fuel, which is not environmentally friendly nor renewable. To provide clean and renewable electricity, nowadays, many renewable energy technologies have been invented like solar power, wind power and tidal power, etc. Solar power is the most accessible and suitable for distribution installation, so it has attracted attention from researchers all over the world.

One of the concerns of solar power is the output power response during transient disturbances. Usually a solar power plant has certain regulation capability. For voltage regulation, we use a 4-quadrant inverter to supply reactive power and mitigate the voltage deviation during the transient. But for frequency regulation, as the active power output of solar PV is only determined by environment condition, we use a battery storage system to supply extra active power and mitigate frequency deviation during a transient. Also, this thesis will show some investigations on the sensitivity of control parameters. Sensitivity studies can give directions for parameter selection of controllers under dierent transient scenarios.

For solar plant investment projects, deciding where to site a plant is always one of the most fundamental questions, and several siting strategies have been proposed. Chapter 4 makes an analytical comparison to three solar plant siting strategies based on simulation. The comparison consists of two perspectives: economic perspective and transient stability perspective.

This thesis will discuss investigations about solar power integration in several aspects. First, some statistics and policy about solar power development are shown. Then EPTool, a simulation toolbox developed on the Matlab platform, is introduced. All the transient simulation results were performed using this toolbox. Also, the models and functions used in this simulation program are illustrated in the thesis.