Stability and power factor improvement in a power system with simultaneous generation of steam and solar power plant

With the advancements of photovoltaic panels Solar power plants extend their grip further in the power system every day. It is necessary that these new power plants work together with classic power plants. In this paper the simultaneous operation of a solar power plant with a steam power plant in a power system has been considered. The solar power plant operates with incremental conductance maximum power point tracking (IncCon MPPT) with direct control which is implemented through a boost converter. The inverter of solar power plant is manipulated to perform active power filtering in addition to converting DC power to AC. A d-q reference frame controller is used to perform the active power filtering. The steam power plant is also uses a PSS to stabilize the power system and damp power transients. A metaheuristic method called smart line search teaching learning based optimization (SLS-TLBO) is used to optimize the PSS parameter. In this paper, it is shown that the simultaneous operation of solar power plant can enhance the performance of the power system.