Adaptive Load Frequency Control of a Grid Connected Solar PV System

This paper presents an adaptive load-frequency control scheme for a grid-connected solar PV system which supplies a load locally. The grid is meant to complement the solar Photo-Voltaic (PV) system ideally, but because of different loading conditions and intermittent nature of the solar PV system grid support becomes necessary. The PV system is integrated to the synchronous generator based grid via power electronic converters which extracts maximum power from solar PV based using Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm to get maximum benefit from the PV system. Integration of renewable energy sources tends to reduce the overall inertia of the grid and hence threaten its stability. Also, perturbations on the load side are known to affect the frequency negatively and now with increased penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources, the frequency problem is expected to be aggravated. The proposed frequency control scheme incorporates a Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) on the grid side to ensure that the grid frequency is restored within a much smaller time post small disturbances on either the load or the generation side. The proposed system is verified using MATLAB-SIMULINK under wide variation in system conditions.