Lessons Learned: Distribution STATCOMs on Legacy 34kV Systems

Power quality (PQ) has become an important research area to utilities, especially with the rapid rise in power-electronics-based load and generation that can exchange non-sinusoidal waveforms into distribution systems. Additionally, utilities are looking to improve the quality of power delivered to their customers, often looking towards new technologies like Distribution STATCOMs (DSes). This paper presents the background and motivation of installing three DSes to address the PQ issues present on a distribution system. Furthermore, this paper proposes various simulation and field measurement based approaches to quantify the impact of DSes on a distribution system in cases like fault response, impact to coefficient of grounding, harmonic injection, etc. Finally, this paper highlights the additional considerations that need to be made while installing DSes on a legacy 34kV system.