A novel Dynamic Voltage Regulator compensation for a stand alone tidal energy conversion scheme

Abstract

Tidal energy is a cheap, clean and abundant source of energy that can be used to feed isolated loads as well as grid connected ones. The variation of output power with the continuous variation of tides can cause significant power quality issues, especially in the case of stand-alone rural loads. The presence of a FACTS device can introduce a significant improvement to the power quality of such networks. This paper studies a stand-alone network consisting of a rural load, such as a small village, fed from a tidal turbine. The effect of the variation in 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.