A study on hybrid Renewable Energy Source interface to the non-ideal grid at distribution level with power quality improvements

Air pollution is one of the prominent issues that we are facing nowadays. The major contributor for air pollution is the waste output of power plants which uses fossil fuels to generate power. Urbanization and industrialization have changed the lifestyle of human society and the need for electrical energy has enhanced significantly. As the conventional energy sources are not capable of serving the purpose, the researchers have turned their face towards Renewable Energy Sources (RES). Energy sources are scattered across the globe, therefore the available green energy at the distribution level is also used to generate electricity. The hybrid combination of wind/solar systems has proved to be a reliable source to the utility. For extracting maximum power from the RES, battery bank is connected across it. Due to the problem associated with the chemical batteries the wind/solar hybrid combination is directly connected to the grid. There are many issues related to the interconnection of RES to the grid which are addressed with the growth in power electronics field. However the power quality issue occurs due to the presence of non-linear loads at the point of common coupling. Shunt active filter has proved to mitigate the problems associated with the non-linear loads. Researchers have limited their work to interconnection of RES to ideal grid voltages which is not the practical case. In this paper the wind/solar hybrid system is modeled and is interconnected to the unbalanced and distorted grid. Also, RES interfacing inverter is added with shunt active filter functionality and hence overall cost curtailment of the project can be achieved.