Issues with Renewable Energy Integration with Grid

In the last article about Renewable energy integration with grid we discussed what is renewable energy and what are its scope to implement what are the challenges that could be faced in integration and what are the technological solutions needed to tackle the challenges. In this Article we will learn in details about the issues that exist in the RE and grid integration. 

the issues are categorized as grid stability, Power quality, load flow problem, and power balance.

Load Flow Problem: this deals with voltage, power, short circuit current   

due to renewable energy integration 

1. there could be a over-voltage issues in the feeder which subsequently impact the feeder performance
2. power generation capacity will be increased but the current infrastructure will not be able to handle it.   
3. protection schemes could be a major risk with respect to voltage or power flow as both will change after integration
4. there is a more possibility that even at normal operation breaker trips due to increase currents i.e short circuit current will increase
5. renewable energy tripping could be a problem as there is a wide range of voltage variation
6. insufficient transmission capacity between generation and consumption
7. the renewable energy such as wind mill cannot be implemented within the city so they need to be placed some outside of city which causes transmission losses

Stability issues: this deals with power, voltage, and frequency

1. for maintaining the stability there is a dependency on reactive power, but due to the increase in renewable energy which gives active power, stability will be impacted
2. renewable energy generators have low short circuit power as compared to synchronous generators which makes fault detection complicated
3. renewable energy has significantly low inertia as compare to synchronous generators which directly relates to the frequency impact.

Power quality issues:

1. increase in the flicker content as RE is directly feed in to grid line via power electronic converter
2.  increase in harmonic distortion due to interface of RE to grid via power electronic equipment
3.  due to RE serving there is a chances of over-voltage at the user side

Grid balance:

1. RE generation leads to change in performance for conventional generators, like rapid change due to the different characteristics there could be a mismatch between generation and load either it is for short term or long term
2. RE are variable in nature and are unpredictable therefore it creates inaccurate reserves or most probably high and creates a mismatch between load and generation.
3. load forecast inaccuracy due to the highly unpredictable nature of RE
4. performance range of RE is limited by the fluctuations in the power, and cannot be used to balance the unforseen outages.