Assessment of harmonic distortion associated with PV penetration in a low voltage distribution network

The photovoltaic penetration brings huge challenges to the distribution networks operators in different aspects related with the power quality. This paper pretends to show an assessment of the distortion of current and voltage signals caused by photovoltaic penetration of a low voltage distribution network based on a CIGRE benchmark with European configuration, which contains three subnetworks, namely residential, industrial and commercial. For this purpose ten photovoltaic systems are proposed, five in the residential, one in the industrial and four in the commercial subnetwork. All of them in five scenarios where each photovoltaic system changes its power rate according to the penetration percentage which could be 1%, 5%, 15%, 30% or 50%. The simulation is developed in OpenDSS software together with Python where the total harmonic distortion of current and voltage are calculated. Additionally, the total losses of the system are presented by each scenario. Results show that the voltage distortion in the transformer points is too small, however, the current distortion exceeds quality standard conditions, especially the residential subnetwork which achieves a current distortion around 80% in the scenario with highest penetration.