The Impacts of Rooftop Solar PV Systems on Secondary Distribution System and Advanced Net Metering

Photovoltaic (PV) systems are gaining importance in the present electrical distribution systems due to government policies and initiatives, hence the power production cost is also decreasing day by day. This paper focuses on the impacts of rooftop solar PV systems on secondary distribution system, which is rated to 30kW grid tied solar power plant. While studying the impacts of rooftop solar PV system on secondary distribution system, it is necessary to study power quality issues arising due to the integration of rooftop solar PV system and also possible solution to mitigate power quality problems. The study has been done on three different cases, first with the 30kW grid tied solar PV system alone, then 30kw grid tied solar PV system with 5 rooftop PV added to the system, finally 30kw grid tied PV system with 5 rooftop PV system with and without adding hybrid filters to the system and the results are obtained using MATLAB which shows the reduction in harmonics after the addition of hybrid filters to the system. Also, an advanced net metering is modelled in this paper which enforces the consumers to install harmonic filters to bring down the THD within limits, thus the consumer will have to pay penalty charges if the THD value exceeds the permissible levels.