Modeling and analysis of MW-level grid-connected PV plant

This paper focuses on the modeling and analysis of the basic composition, characteristic and the interactions with grid for megawatt (MW)-level large scale grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) plants. For a MW-level PV plant, numbers of inverters with relatively smaller capacity are employed to operated in parallel. When the irradiance on the large area of PV array is not equal, the output power verses the voltage of the PV array will have several peak values and affect the maximal power tracking. LCL filters are adopted for filtering the harmonics generated by inverters, but due to its inherent resonance character, additional damping strategy is required. The power quantity of harmonics and voltage fluctuation may occur when one MW-level PV plant is connected to grid. For these characteristics, with the modeling and simulation of a real MW-level PV plant, this paper proposed and verified a novel method toward MPPT of large area PV arrays. The parallel running of inverters and grid voltage fluctuation are also simulated. Finally, the interaction with the grid voltage fluctuation is explored in detail. © 2011 IEEE