Virtual inertia impact on the performance of photovoltaic system

With the enormous stress of energy lack and air pollution, renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic sources become an effective solution to these problems. The penetration of photovoltaic sources into power system has adverse effects on overall moment of inertia and damping, this threatens system stability. To assist the stability, the concept of virtual synchronous generator (VSG) has introduced as an inverter control method to add virtual inertia to the system. This paper demonstrates the effects of adding virtual inertia on the system performance when fed from a photovoltaic source. The effects of changing the system and VSG parameters on the overall performance is also studied to show the appropriate change in each parameter that enhance the performance. The theoretical results that obtained using the MATLAB/SIMULINK are verified experimentally, using a DSP-based laboratory model that fed from a PV source.