Photovoltaic-grid hybrid power fed pump drive operation for curbing the intermittency in PV power generation with grid side limited power conditioning

• Hybrid sourced (PV+ Grid) configuration has been proposed for pump drive operation to reduce its dependency on Grid.
• The rating of the VSC will be limited as per design based on the rating of the drive for pumping operation.
• Apart from supplementing the real power demand for smooth pump drive operation the grid side VSC could also be utilized for power quality improvement.
• The proposed system is validated through both simulation and hardware results.

Existing pump drive systems are fed from the grid. In case grid fails, it takes time to restart the pump drive, and unnecessarily power is wasted in restarting. Moreover, to reduce the burden on the grid and also to curb the intermittency a hybrid configuration is proposed in which PV system is integrated with grid to cater the pump load operation. Even if the grid fails, the PV system works in islanded mode to cater the pump load at the permissible limit depending on the generation by PV system alone in the absence of storage systems. To establish a bidirectional power flow a voltage source converter (VSC) based grid coupling is considered which also provide limited power conditioning to utilize the capacity of VSC at maximum to solve Grid power quality issues like unbalance current, harmonics, etc. The synchronous reference frame (SRF) method is used for current decomposition for determining the limited compensation to be provided by the grid coupled VSC, based on its unutilized capacity. MATLAB based simulation and experimental results show the efficient working of hybrid configuration in both grid connected mode and islanded mode with limited power conditioning.