Power Quality Management in Renewable Energy Systems
Summary
The integration of renewable energy sources into power systems has introduced significant challenges in maintaining voltage stability, frequency regulation and waveform integrity. Variable generation from wind turbines and photovoltaic arrays leads to voltage fluctuations, flicker and harmonic distortion, while power electronic interfaces can exacerbate unbalance and reactive‐power requirements. Effective power quality management combines comprehensive assessment frameworks, real‐time monitoring and active compensation techniques. Assessment frameworks quantify key phenomena—voltage sags, swells, harmonics and imbalance—via unified indices, enabling comparison across buses and entire networks. Real‐time monitoring platforms employ data clustering and dynamic weighting to detect evolving power quality conditions, guiding deployment of custom power devices such as shunt active power filters or distribution static compensators. Control strategies range from model-based designs ensuring stability under high penetration to network-wide algorithms leveraging topological metrics. Together, these developments support resilient grid operation, facilitate higher shares of renewables and reduce operational risks for utilities and end users.
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Power Quality Management in Renewable Energy Systems publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in power quality management in renewable energy systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Power Quality (PQ): The degree to which voltage, current and frequency waveforms conform to nominal values, ensuring reliable operation of electrical equipment.
Distributed Generation (DG): Small-scale electricity production located close to load centres, often from renewable sources such as solar panels or wind turbines.
Custom Power Devices (CPDs): Power electronics systems (e.g. active filters, STATCOMs) designed to mitigate power quality issues by injecting or absorbing voltage and current components.
Harmonics: Voltage or current components at integer multiples of the fundamental system frequency, causing waveform distortion and potential equipment overheating.
Total Harmonic Distortion (THD): A measure of the ratio of the sum of the powers of all harmonic components to the power of the fundamental frequency, used to quantify waveform distortion.
References
- Power Quality Assessment of Distorted Distribution Networks Incorporating Renewable Distributed Generation Systems Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process. IEEE Access (2020).
- Comprehensive power quality evaluation method of microgrid with dynamic weighting based on CRITIC. Measurement and Control (2021).
- A Lyapunov-Function Based Controller for 3-Phase Shunt Active Power Filter and Performance Assessment Considering Different System Scenarios. IEEE Access (2021).
- Combined Cluster Analysis and Global Power Quality Indices for the Qualitative Assessment of the Time-Varying Condition of Power Quality in an Electrical Power Network with Distributed Generation. Energies (2020).
- A Grid-Wide Comprehensive Evaluation Method of Power Quality Based on Complex Network Theory. Energies (2024).
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