Design of Distributed Synchronous Inverters for Renewable Energy Generation Control and Distribution Loss Minimization

Presently, climate change due to the overuse of fossil fuel has become a series issue that the human being worldwide must face. To alleviate the growth of global greenhouse gas, promotion of renewable energy generation and energy conservation are the global trends. Intelligent buildings, employing advanced communication and control technique, can boost power consumption efficiency. However, due to the habit discrepancy between the power customers as well as the continuous increase in power consumption, the promotion of the demand-side renewable energy generation and the reduction of power transmission loss are the most economic and effective strategies to attain energy saving and carbon reduction. This project plans to achieve these goals in two years. In the First Phase, a 500VAR wall receptacle plugged power factor corrector (PFC) will be developed to reduce the reactive current in house wiring to avoid fire caused by overload condition. In addition, a 3kVAR switch box plugged PFC will be designed to improve distribution loss. The PFCs, with the current-sourced inverter based structure, can inject reactive current according to the load demand regardless of the voltage level. The control of the PFC will be realized by a digital CPLD chip which is a prototypal standard application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). In the Second Phase, a 3kW grid tied inverter for wind and solar power generation will be developed in the vicinity of the load. A DSP-based microcontroller, featuring with the flexibility of easy programming, will be adopted to carry out the grid synchronism and maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms. Finally, we will integrate the prior achievements to a virtual distribution power system in order to verify the effectiveness of energy conservation and line loss reduction contributed by the proposed demand-side PFC and renewable energy generation system. It is expected that the proposed system can reduce line loss of 1.5TWh/year and fossil fuel based power generation of 3.1TWh/year when the power generation provided by the demand-side renewable energy system achieves 5% of the total loading of the meter rate lighting customers in Taiwan.

Project ID:PB10108-2652
External Project ID:NSC101-2221-E182-069