Reactive Power Compensation and Efficient Power Evacuation for a 35 MW AC Grid Tied Solar PV Plant

For the last couple of years, the government of Bangladesh is giving top priority to establish MW range solar PV plant to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels as well as to meet the target of attaining 20% of generated power from the renewable sources by the end of the year 2020. Still the government is far behind in achieving the target and is encouraging the private sectors to establish solar PV based power plant. The plants need to be well analyzed in terms of load flow study, short circuit analysis and to study the overall performance of the plant once it is tied up with the grid network. As the plant will be tied up with the grid network, any internal or external faults will definitely affect the plant as well as the grid. Power evacuation from a large solar plant like this is a big challenge and different parameters like voltage dips, real and reactive power conditions at prominent sections etc. under varying loads has to be well monitored. In this paper, the performance of a grid tied 35MW AC solar PV plant (to be commissioned soon) located at Munshiganj, Dhaka, Bangladesh has been thoroughly studied under ETAP environment to predict performance of the plant under varying load or short circuited conditions. Also the study reveals how effectively power evacuation can be made through the feed in point at the grid, possible active and reactive power flowing under different conditions, necessary compensation for reactive power, voltage dips at different buses of the PV plant etc. Because of the fact that uncontrolled reactive power can endanger the components of the plant and even can cause power outages, robust infrastructure with reactive compensation must be put together in order to prevent such outages to occur.