Some practical solutions to improving power quality at LV distribution customers’: a case study

The growth of especially small-scale distributed generation connected to the low voltage electricity grid has brought significant benefits to customers, but has brought new challenges for Distribution System Operators (DSOs), who must face new operation problems due to the new paradigms originating in the actual distribution networks. Furthermore, power quality concerns such as voltage fluctuations and voltage harmonic distortion are going to increase for the massive increase of renewable systems that go to add itself to the ever-increasing penetration of non-linear loads. The present paper has the main aim of illustrating some typical concerns of distributed generation capillary penetration in actual networks jointly with the relevant solutions that can be adopted. In particular, the problems are derived from a case study relevant to a system of a local distribution system operator for which a comprehensive investigation has been performed.