Control Strategy Applied to Smart Photovoltaic Inverters for Reactive Power Exchange Through Volt-Var Control to Improve Voltage Quality in Electrical Distribution Networks

Photovoltaic (PV) generation systems have become part of the electrical distribution networks due to their clean energy and adaptability. The increasing energy consumption and the several load types in the distribution network could produce voltage deviation. Therefore, there are some strategies, which are used to solve this problem, for example, capacitor banks, voltage regulators, transformer tap variation, static Var compensators, and reactive power exchange employing inverters. This article presents a smart inverter able to deliver and absorb reactive power through Volt-Var control to solve voltage deviations. The inverter compensates for voltage deviation in the primary transformer, whether inductive or capacitive loads are connected in the point of common coupling (PCC). In consequence, the inverter improves the voltage quality in the entire network. Finally, total harmonics percentage (THD) and frequency deviation have an acceptable performance during the operation, due to the inverter hardware configuration, and the phase-locked loop (PLL) implementation.