Impact of a high penetra tion of electric vehicles and photovoltaic inverters on power quality in an urban residential grid part II-harmonic distortion

Abstract

This paper presents a measurement-based assessment of the impact of a high penetration of plug-in electric vehicles with on-board charger (EVC) and photovoltaic inverters (PVI) on Power Quality in a public low voltage (LV) network with residential customers. This is the second part of a two-part paper. While part I provides all details about the measurement location and discusses the impact on unbalance, this part is focused on the harmonic distortion. The results are based on extensive measurements in an urban grid with almost 100 households (HH), 43 PVIs and 36 EVCs. This paper discusses in detail the impact of PVI and EVC on selected low order harmonics as well as the total harmonic distortion at different levels of customer aggregation. At first the individual impact of a single PVI and EVC are analyzed for different operating conditions. In particular, a sunny day, a cloudy day and hours during the night are used for PVI, while periods of charging and periods of no-charging are considered for EVC. Next, the interaction between PVI, EVC and the residual household load at household level is discussed. Finally, the impact on current and voltage distortion at the level of the low voltage grid is analyzed.