Distributed Energy Storage Based Series Compensator to Mitigate Power Quality Problems

Power quality is gaining more interest especially in the deregulated markets with competitive electrical suppliers. Moreover, some critical loads require power supply contracts with premium power quality. Usually, to improve power quality utilities install power quality conditioners. However, new approaches are presented and implemented to improve the power quality through controlling the interfacing converters used with distributed generators and energy storage units. This paper presents a voltage control based power quality mitigation technique. The proposed technique is applied to the voltage source inverter used to interface energy storage to mitigate some power quality problems such as harmonic distortion, voltage sag and voltage swell occurs after fault clearing actions. The system is modeled and simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK to validate the proposed technique. Results show successful action of the proposed technique in improving the power quality by significant reduction in the harmonic contents in the presence of nonlinear loads. Moreover, the compensator mitigates the voltage sag problem by keeping the voltage at load terminals constant during disturbances with 2–3 % change in voltage. In addition, the proposed technique allows the uninterruptable power supply feature by supplying the load during supply interruption for duration depends on the stored energy.