Hosting Capacity Improvement Using Reactive Power Control Strategy of Rooftop PV Inverters

Since on-grid rooftop photovoltaic (PV) installation is rapidly growing, and the interconnection requests of a new rooftop PV installation are still increasing, the improvement of PV hosting capacity of large-scale rooftop PV penetration needs to be studied. In this paper, the strategy to improve PV hosting capacity using reactive power control of PV inverters is provided. Since the load demand and PV output vary with the time, the results are provided in time-series. Monte Carlo based method is constructed to model the random nature of PV penetration concerning PV size and location. Furthermore, an evaluation study is provided to obtain the appropriate PV power factor setting of which the PV hosting capacities are the highest. Firstly, several possible settings of PV power factor are constructed to conduct an evaluation study of reactive power control scenarios. Secondly, the best setting is chosen concerning the ability for generating the highest PV hosting capacity. In addition, a case study is provided to assess the best setting presented by the evaluation study. The results show that rooftop PV penetration with lagging power factor setting of PV inverters generates higher PV hosting capacity compared to rooftop PV penetration with unity power factor setting, with an improvement rate of 96%.