A Dynamic Voltage Regulator compensation scheme for a grid connected village electricity hybrid wind/tidal energy conversion scheme

Renewable energy can act as a sufficient and economic source of electrical energy in rural villages. In spite of being cheap, clean and abundant, the continuous fluctuations in the renewable energy sources causes significant power quality issues. Although the presence of a weak grid improves the rural village power quality, the presence of a FACTS device can introduce a significant improvement to the power quality of such a network. This paper studies a network presenting a rural load, such as a small village, fed from a wind turbine and a tidal turbine connected to a weak grid. The effect of the variation in wind speed and tides on the power quality is illustrated via simulation. The introduction of the Dynamic Voltage Regulator (DVR) to the network establishes a significant improvement to the power quality. The proposed DVR is a cheap and robust FACTS based device. It is controlled via a tri-loop dynamic error-driven PI controller. This scheme proved its ability to introduce a significant improvement which is illustrated via comparing the simulation results of the studied network with and without the DVR.