Power Quality Issues in Autonomous Solar Photovoltaic Utility Microgrid Employing a STATCOM Based Intelligent Controller

Microgrid has emerged as an efficient autonomous decentralized utility grid to reduce the dependency on the regular electric grid. It also benefits in the reduction of unwanted transient and harmonics and results in overall power quality improvement. The study is essentially focused on the Solar PV unit because of its increasing importance and promising outcome despite several inferiorities. It has been observed that a reactive power divergence has created a significant power quality issue in the solar PV-based micro grid system, which in turn results in significant voltage fluctuation and deterioration in overall power quality. This fluctuation has a considerable impact on both steady-state, transient stability and sometimes responsible for the inadequate performance of the solar PV unit. Hence, this work is mainly dedicated to compensate for the reactive power and to overcome the problems of maintaining a constant voltage profile of a solar photovoltaic-based standalone or hybrid microgrid system. Therefore, this study employs a fuzzy controller and a Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM); the obtained result or outcome reveals that this proposed novel, cutting-edge system successfully maintains stability and improves power quality in utility PV-microgrids.