Viability Analysis on DSTATCOM-Fuel Cell for Mitigating Voltage Fluctuation in Large-scaled Photovoltaic System

The intermittent nature of photovoltaic (PV) power generation has been shown to cause network instability i.e. voltage fluctuation. A distributed static synchronous compensator integrated with a fuel cell system (DSTATCOM-fuel cell system) is proposed to smoothen the PV power output, hence mitigating the voltage fluctuation. It is controlled by a proportional integral (PI)-based controller using a moving average smoothing algorithm to manipulate the active and reactive power exchange. The proposed system is analyzed on a low voltage distribution network with a large-scaled photovoltaic system using MATLAB Simulink. Results have shown that the DSTATCOM-fuel cell system has effectively smoothing of PV power output while regulating the coupling point (PCC) voltage at 1 p.u.