DISTRIBUTED GENERATION POWER QUALITY ASSESSMENT USING A UNIFIED POWER QUALITY INDEX

Abstract

The increasing growth of renewable energy systems changes the behavior of traditional central generation electric power systems, and the transition towards the smart grids should accommodate these changes. There are a variety of distribution generation (DG) systems configurations that can cause severe problems to the security and power quality (PQ) of the systems. Hence, it is important to evaluate and compare the impact of each of them on the system PQ. To date, there is no agreed upon approach to quantify the overall power quality performance of a system in the presence of distributed generation units because of the numerous power quality definitions, perspectives, and phenomena. The main objective of this research is to introduce a new unified power quality index (UPQI) to evaluate, assess and compare the effectiveness of different interface configurations with different sizing and siting of DG systems such as wind, photovoltaic (PV), and fuel cell energy systems under different operating conditions