Study of grid connected solar photovoltaic system using real time digital simulator

Renewable Energy Sources are gaining momentum and are consistently increasing their footprint in the power sector due to increased awareness of environmental impacts from widespread utilization of fossil fuels. Solar-energy-based photovoltaic (PV) systems are quickly growing source of distributed generation (DG) and are connected to the power distribution system. The advancement in the field of power electronics, converter topologies and algorithms such as Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) have fostered a renewed interest in utility scale solar PV plants. A real time modeling of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and their behavior when connected to a distribution grid system is of keen interest. This paper addresses this interest and performs a transient modeling of the grid connected solar PV plant along with MPPT algorithm using the Incremental Conductance Method implemented on a Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS), considering data from practical sites. The simulation demonstrates the behavior of solar PV plant for variations in the performance parameters and also demonstrates that cost-effective simulations of PV generation systems are possible using RTDS. A model of a solar PV plant has been developed and the same has been used to track the behavior of the model developed in RTDS.