Harmonics Analysis of a Photovoltaic Plant with a Reduced Number of Solar Central Inverters

This paper introduces a comparative harmonics analysis of a grid-connected photovoltaic 200-MW plant with a reduced number of central inverters with medium-voltage capacitor banks. This analysis has been conducted for the photovoltaic plant with 120 and 138 solar inverters without capacitor banks and with 120 solar inverters with 3×10 MVAR capacitor banks. Calculations have been performed using ETAP software for all three cases. Three harmonics models have been introduced for each solar inverter and these models are typical IEEE-6 pulse, IEEE-12 pulse, and IEEE-18 pulse models.