Investigate the Dynamic Performance of Renewable Electric Generation Systems

Abstract

The factors such as energy access, security and environmental considerations, and the increasing fuel prices have accelerated the adoption of affordable Renewable Electric Generation Systems (REGS). These systems decrease the dependency on imported fossil fuels and help in reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. The renewable energy technologies, such as hydraulic turbine, solar cell, micro turbine, fuel cell, and wind turbine can deliver power with virtually zero emissions. The renewable generation is also referred by names such as distributed generation (DG), dispersed generation, embedded generation etc. The REGS are getting more importance as an alternate to large centralized generation plants, which is driven by the rapidly evolving liberalization and deregulation environments. In this thesis, two renewable electric generation systems namely micro turbine (MT) system and fuel cell (FC) system has been studied. The MT system consists of micro turbine driven permanent magnet synchronous machine feeding to ac utility system via the power electronic interface. The FC system consists of solid oxide fuel cell is feeding to ac utility via the power conditioning unit interface. The detailed dynamic models of each component have been developed and the models are implemented under SIMULINK environment. The dynamic performance has been studied. The micro turbine operation during initial motoring and thereafter generating mode has been studied. The performance during grid connection and islanding is also studied. The active and reactive power variation for the connection of fuel cell system with ac utility has been studied.