Modeling and Analysis of STATCOM for Renewable Energy Farm to Improve Power Quality and Reactive Power Compensation

Power Quality (PQ) improvement in grid-integrated photovoltaic (PV) and wind energy hybrid systems for effective power transfer is presented in this paper. Due to interlinked hybrid renewable energy resources and nonlinear loads, various issues arise which affect the power quality, i.e., voltage sag, harmonic distortion increases, and also reactive power demand. In order to mitigate these issues, flexible alternating current transmission system (FACTS) devices are utilized. In this paper, hysteresis band current controller (HBCC)-based static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) is modeled to reduce PQ problems. HBCC is a robust and simple technique to improve voltage profile, reduce total harmonic distortion (THD) and fulfill the reactive power demand. Two case scenarios of the hybrid system, i.e., (I) grid integrated hybrid system without HBCC (II) grid integrated hybrid system with HBCC, are tested. Results demonstrate that under scenario II, load bus voltage is regulated at 1.0 p.u., THD of system voltage and current is reduced 0.25% and 0.35%, respectively, and reactive power demand of 30 kVAR is fulfilled. The HBCC was designed for reducing THD of the system with the limits specified by standards IEEE 519-1992 STATCOM using hysteresis band current controller to improve power quality in the distribution system which is simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK. After that, the performance of the system is better in terms of power quality.