Hosting Capacity Enhancement Through IoT-based Active Power Curtailment of PV Generation

Abstract

Due to the high cost of installing large thermal power plants and the resulting emissions from such plants, consumers were encouraged to install rooftop photovoltaic systems. Yet, challenges of integrating solar power into the distribution networks are restraining the amount of allowed generation from rooftop PV systems. Grid operators (GO) started to even limit rooftop PV systems installation capacity toa maximum of their respective load peak value. This paper presents an IoT-based hosting capacity enhancement techniqueby active power curtailment of the power generated from the PV systems at prosumers. Where the IoT establishes a communication channel between the Grid Operator (GO) and all prosumers using the Internet-of-Asset (IoA) architecture. Measurement signals of the Low Voltage (LV) network, solar irradiation, and temperature are necessary for the control technique to generate the reference control voltage for the solar inverter to produce the curtailed PV generation. Theeffect of load and irradiation variation is studied in the presence of the MPPT control, and the GO control, this term isused to describe GO's signal to curtail PV generation. The system has been modeled and simulated via the MATLAB/Simulink® software package. The results validate the effectiveness of this enhancement technique in keeping the overvoltage levels below limits.