Online Assessment of Transient Stability of Grid Connected PV Generator With DC Link Voltage and Reactive Power Control

The proliferation of Photovoltaic (PV) generation has brought several changes in the transient stability analysis of power systems. The rotor angle dynamics based stability analysis used for synchronous generators may not be applicable for PV generators. In the existing literature, the transient stability of a grid connected PV generator with dc link voltage and reactive power control (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{dc}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> control) is analyzed from the coupled nonlinear functions corresponding to PV control loops, Phase Locked Loop (PLL) and network dynamics. The existing method may not be suitable for online transient stability assessment because it is computationally heavy. This paper proposes an online transient stability criterion for a PV generator (with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{dc}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> control) connected to grid modelled as infinite bus. The PV generator is considered to have Low Voltage Ride Through (LVRT) capability, but does not provide voltage support. In this study, the relation between the ac and dc side dynamics is explored. A stability criterion is proposed to assess the transient stability by monitoring the swing in the energy of the dc link capacitor. The proposed criterion requires the dc link voltage trajectory only till the first swing of the dc link voltage. As a result, the proposed assessment criterion is computationally less demanding and less prone to measurement errors in comparison to existing methods. Thus, the proposed criterion is suitable for online transient stability assessment. The effectiveness of the proposed criterion is verified for single-stage as well as two-stage converter configurations of PV generator. The proposed criterion is also verified on a modified IEEE 39 bus system. Time-domain simulations are carried out to validate the proposed criterion. The proposed approach is compared with an existing transient stability criterion for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{dc}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> control based grid connected PV generator. The advantages of the proposed method as compared to the existing method are discussed.