Steady-State Model of Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Generation for Power Flow Analysis

A new model of a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) plant suitable for power flow analysis is proposed in this paper. Unlike existing models, the proposal departs from the equivalent generator representation of the PV plant and is based instead on the operation and control modes of PV panels and voltage source converters. The resulting set of nonlinear equations is assembled together with the network's equations to formulate a generalized power flow problem in a unified frame of reference, which is efficiently solved by using the Newton-Raphson algorithm. The complementarity condition approach is adopted for directly including all operation and control mode constraints of the PV plant in the power flow formulation, which permits the simultaneous and automatic handling of limits of all state variables associated with these constraints during the iterative solution process. The effectiveness of the proposed method is fully demonstrated by numerical examples.