PHOTOVOLTAIC-BASED STORAGE-LESS SYSTEM TO SUPPORT ISLANDING IN DISTRIBUTION GRIDS

Occasionally islanding specific areas of a distribution grid could provide benefits such as the improvement of the grid's reliability and resilience. In the past years, several European distribution system operators have built demonstrators to test islanding on existing distribution grids. These demonstrators have often been based on battery energy storage systems, but the integration of such systems has proven to be burdensome, notably because of their very high costs. This research aims at developing an islanding solution based on already installed photovoltaic (PV) plants and that would require a minimum amount of changes in the existing distribution grids. More specifically, this paper proposes a control structure for a PV-based grid-forming system that can be used as a building block for the pursued islanding solution. A set of simulation results demonstrates that the proposed system is capable of withstanding severe perturbations while functioning in stand-alone mode.