Power Quality Improvement using STATCOM with Renewable Energy Sources

The renewable energy sources play an important role in electric power generation with growing environmental concerns. The inter connection of renewable energy sources are incorporated using power electronics converters, with the aim of improving power quality at the point of common coupling (PCC). This paper presents a novel idea where a STATCOM is used innovatively as i) a load reactive power compensator ii) an interface unit between the grid and renewable energy source, and iii) as an effective method for real power exchange between the dynamic load system, grid and renewable energy source. A controller unit is proposed for the STATCOM based on modified Icos phi algorithm by which reactive power compensation and power factor correction is done and also real power support is provided by renewable energy source through STATCOM. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the modified Instantaneous Reactive Power Theory (IRPT) control algorithm to achieve the above objectives.