The sustainable development plan in the EU and the worldwide commitments against climate change dictate decarbonisation of the energy sector by integrating massive amounts of renewable energy sources. Among the various renewables, the solar photovoltaic (PV) technology has shown excellent potential for high integration in both rural and urban environment, but currently faces important limitations that do not allow “too much” solar to be incorporated into our electrical network. This is mainly because we cannot control when the sun shines (e.g. no generation during the night) and because the solar PV systems are not “grid-friendly”, i.e. they cannot assist the grid during electrical disturbances. If these technical limitations, similar to other renewables too, are not overcome we will never manage to integrate the necessary high levels of solar into the electrical network and will fail our decarbonisation targets.
The PVCI project aims to investigate these technical challenges and come up with control methods to transform the PV parks into more “grid-friendly” power stations that will allow much higher deployment levels into the power system. More specifically, a major objective of the project is to develop smart control strategies for the solar park towards provision of “ancillary services” to the network, i.e. to be able to support the electric grid during faults and other disturbances. Another main goal is to develop the proper modelling framework to study complicated “dynamic phenomena” related to the operation of PV systems, so as to assess how much solar we can deploy.
The results of this project serve as a useful tool and guide to increase the amount of solar integrated into our power system, contributing to our sustainable targets and the leader position EU holds in the PV industry.
