Power Quality Enhancement of Remote Gas Field Generations with Smart Power Converters

Direct power generation near gas fields offers numerous benefits, including optimized economic efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Moreover, building on-site greenhouses emerges as a promising approach to further minimize carbon emissions and residual heat, greatly promoting resource utiliz...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergies (Basel) Vol. 16; no. 18; p. 6684
Main Authors Li, Wenze, Liu, Rui, Li, Yunwei
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2023
Subjects
Alternative energy sources
back-to-back converter controls
cogeneration
Cogeneration power plants
Electric current converters
Electric power production
Electricity
Electricity distribution
Energy resources
Gas-turbines
Greenhouses
grid-following
grid-forming
Industrial efficiency
Natural gas
Power plants
power quality
Renewable resources
system dynamics
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Summary:Direct power generation near gas fields offers numerous benefits, including optimized economic efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Moreover, building on-site greenhouses emerges as a promising approach to further minimize carbon emissions and residual heat, greatly promoting resource utilization. However, such power plants generally have access to a weak grid due to their remote locations, and they also contain nonlinear local loads, such as the grow lights in the greenhouses. Consequently, the generation system is susceptible to power quality issues, manifested in overvoltage and harmonics. To address these issues, a smart back-to-back converter is employed to interconnect the gas turbine generator and the utility grid. This smart converter not only enhances power quality but also offers potential ancillary services that contribute to the dynamics of the gas generation system, such as damping low-frequency oscillation among parallel-connected generators. In this paper, three control configurations for the back-to-back converter are developed, enabling the coordinated regulation of exported active power, AC voltage, and DC-link voltage in either a grid-following or grid-forming manner. Furthermore, comparative studies are conducted to provide guidelines for selecting an appropriate control strategy that ensures stable operation under various short circuit ratios. A practical gas cogeneration system is chosen to evaluate the performance of the back-to-back converter, and real-time simulations based on RT-LAB are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the methodology.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en16186684