Integration of large- scale PV plants in non-sinusoidal environments: Considerations on hosting capacity and harmonic distortion limits

Distributed generation (DG) penetration in a system may affect power quality, and energy efficiency, if it exceeds a particular value, known as the system's hosting capacity (HC). In this work, a comprehensive overview of hosting capacity and harmonic distortion limits is presented and discussed. The highest allowable penetration level of photovoltaic (PV)-based distributed generation units, hosted on typical industrial distribution systems, was analyzed in terms of the three power quality and energy efficiency performance parameters, namely bus voltage limits, line ampacities, and harmonic distortion limits. The analytical results show that the system's HC decreases with increase in utility side's background voltage distortion and load side's nonlinearity values. The HC level was affected more by the nonlinearity of the load side than by the utility side's background voltage distortion. Therefore, a single-tuned passive filter is suggested for maximizing the system's limited HC. Further, an optimization algorithm was developed to find simultaneously the system's HC and the parameters of the proposed filter, by considering the three performance parameters as constraints. The proposed filter design was found to attain a better level of HC than what can be obtained with a traditional filter design, based on current demand distortion minimization.