Impact of Photovoltaic (PV) Systems on Distribution Networks

Traditionally, power systems are designed to operate in a unidirectional power flow. In the last past few years, solar photovoltaic (PV) system has grown rapidly given its potential technical and economic benefits which include higher network utilization, enhanced reliability and loss reduction. In order to the PV generation depends directly to the sun's energy, thus, this is potentially can cause some problems in higher penetration levels. Voltage fluctuation and power quality issues may limit the PV penetration level and hence measures are needed to alleviate the potential problems. In this paper PV modeling and its impact on the distribution network in term of voltage performance and losses has been investigated by using the OpenDss simulator tool. Mitigation strategy has also been proposed to control the voltage fluctuation that caused by PV plants. IEEE 13-bus test system was used to perform the case study of distribution systems in order to assess the impact of grid tied PV systems