Development of Bi-directional energy meter for a grid-connected PV system with power quality improvement using D-STATCOM

Solar energy is available abundant in nature and it is free from pollution. As the system is a noiseless solar photovoltaic system (PV) is the best solution at residential levels but the main drawback of solar energy is unreliability. It is important to give a reliable supply of power quality. In the case of OFF-grid solar system, storage batteries are required in order to have a reliable supply, it improves the total cost of the system. In ON-grid solar system, the demand can be assured by solar energy and energy can be drawn from the grid. In such framework surplus power is provided to the grid, and that sent out power must be accounted for. The energy meter has to records exported power from consumer to grid and imported power from grid to consumer load. In this paper grid-connected solar PV system having bidirectional energy meter with power quality improvement by DSTATCOM is proposed. The work is divided into two modes: 1. DSTATCOM mode: In this mode, some of the produced solar energy is used for the operation of DSTATCOM. The simulation was carried out using MATLAB software. The results clearly shows DSTATCOM works properly on voltage sag. 2. NET-METERING mode: In this mode, the energy meter monitors the distinction between imported power from network and surplus or sent out power to the network. The proposed meter consists of a voltage and a current measurement circuit that measured the instantaneous voltage and current. The raspberry pi acts as a processing unit and to display the energy at regular intervals, the LCD display is used.