Assessment of Capacitor Banks Control Practices in Distribution Systems with High PV Penetration

This work evaluates the impact of photovoltaic (PV) generation on the operation of switched capacitor banks for an entire utility. The major concern of the utility refers to a possible increase in the number of switching operations, which must not surpass four operations per day. In the simulations, the PV generators considered range from small units installed at low voltage (LV) systems to large units installed at medium voltage (MV) systems. More than 760 switched capacitor banks are assessed, where only the banks controlled by current and power factor experienced problems with the number of switching. The proposed solution for these cases is to update their control mode to reactive power, which, according to the simulation results, respects the imposed limit for all banks considering scenarios of high PV penetration. Therefore, such change in the control philosophy represents a plausible solution to counteract the effects of PV penetration increase.