Transient Stability Improvement of a Hybrid Power System: A Novel Configuration of Compensating Type Custom Power Devices and Fault Current Limiters.

Applying distributed energy resources (DERs) to power systems has been promoted as a promising option to meet the growing electricity demand. Despite significant economic, environmental, and resiliency benefits, integrating DER, including power electronic devices, into the existing power networks causes stability and power quality issues. Therefore, to meet stability and power quality standard limits, a sort of compensation using cost-effective and energy-efficient technologies and power electronics-based concepts is needed. This paper presents a novel configuration of compensating type custom power devices (CPDs) and fault current limiters (FCLs) for limiting balanced and unbalanced faults and improving the transient performance of distributed generation (DG) sources in a hybrid power system. Moreover, three power grid operational scenarios are addressed to reflect the impact of the type of fault and variable power generation capacity of DGs on transient stability. Four configurations are implemented using two FCLs (BFCL and SFCL) and two energy compensation devices (DVR and UPQC). The transient performance of involved DGs with and without applying proposed compensation methods is simulated. Simulation experiments were carried out using MATLAB/SIMULINK software. The simulation results indicate that UPQC- BFCL is the best solution in all scenarios that improve the transient stability of the proposed power system under both balanced and unbalanced faults.

Keywords:

Custom Power Devices , Dynamic Voltage Restorer , fault current limiter , transient stability , unified power quality conditioner