An approach of incorporating harmonic mitigation units in an industrial distribution network with renewable penetration

Due to globalization and industrial development, the need of power is increasing day by day. In addition, due to the high demand for clean energy sources, the use of renewable systems has expanded in recent years. Wind systems can take advantage of the copious and free energy provided by the wind, which is a significant benefit. However, changing incident energy from renewables generate harmonics, which may result in poor system performance. The power quality has therefore become an important issue for both the power suppliers and consumers. Power electronic devices and nonlinear loads have been used frequently in industries hence introducing harmonic distortions in the industrial power distribution network. Harmonics have adverse effects on the power quality like degradation of power generation efficiency, higher operational costs, overheating of equipment, saturation of transformer, electromagnetic interference etc. In order to solve these problems, the implementation of suitable filtration techniques and the evaluation of efficiency with harmonic reduction are crucial. Since, utilities are always aiming to improve the power quality with minimum filtering units, this paper compares the performance of two available filter implementation plan, namely the shunt active power filter (SAPF) and the single tuned filter (STF) in a renewable penetrated industrial distribution network. Based on the outcome of the comparison, a genetic algorithm (GA) based approach is proposed in this paper to determine the optimum size and position of the minimum required filtering units that improves the network’s existing harmonic scenarios. Simulation results to validate the proposed methodology are presented. According to the results, the proposed method of incorporating filtering units significantly outperformed in lowering total harmonic distortion (THD) in an industrial power distribution network with a higher renewable penetration.