IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION, VOL. 22, NO.

4, DECEMBER 2007 881

A Single-Stage Three-Phase Grid-Connected
Photovoltaic System With Modied MPPT
Method and Reactive Power Compensation
Wu Libo, Zhao Zhengming, Senior Member, IEEE, and Liu Jianzheng
AbstractSingle-stage grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) sys-
tems have advantages such as simple topology, high efciency, etc.
However, since all the control objectives such as the maximum
power point tracking (MPPT), synchronizationwiththe utility volt-
age, and harmonics reduction for output current need to be consid-
ered simultaneously, the complexity of the control scheme is much
increased. This paper presents the implementation of a single-stage
three-phase grid-connected PV system. In addition to realize the
aforementioned control objectives, the proposed control can also
remarkably improve the stability of the MPPTmethod with a mod-
ied incremental conductance MPPT method. The reactive power
compensation for local load is also realized, so as to alleviate grid
burden. A DSP is employed to implement the proposed MPPT
controller and reactive power compensation unit. Simulation and
experimental results show the high stability and high efciency of
this single-stage three-phase grid-connected PV system.
Index TermsGrid-connected inverters, maximum power point
tracking (MPPT), photovoltaic (PV), solar energy.
I. INTRODUCTION
P
HOTOVOLTAIC (PV) systems are solar energy supply
systems, which either supply power directly to an electri-
cal equipment or feed energy into the public electricity grid.
Generally, PVs are considered as an expensive method of pro-
ducing electricity. However, in stand-alone situations, PVs are
the most economic solutions to provide the required power ser-
vice. Moreover, with the development of PVtechnologies, appli-
cations of PVs in grid-connected situations have grown rapidly,
indicating that PVs are very attractive to produce environmen-
tally benign electricity for diversied purposes [1][3].
Power electronic conversion is the key to improve the ef-
ciency of PV panels and the system stability in grid-connected
PV systems. One task of power electronic conversion is to con-
tinuously adapt the system such that it can draw the maximum
power from the PV panels regardless of weather or load con-
ditions. Since the PV panels have a nonlinear voltagecurrent
characteristics, and the insolation and ambient temperature are
unpredictable, the maximum power point tracking (MPPT)
controller tends to be a nonlinear and time-varying system.
Many MPPT techniques have been developed such as the per-
turb and observe method [4], [5], the incremental conductance
method [6], etc. The perturb and observe method is simple for
Manuscript received October 25, 2005; revised June 28, 2006. Paper no.
TEC-00363-2005.
The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Power Systems, De-
partment of Electrical Engineering and Applied Electronic Technology, Ts-
inghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: wulibo@tsinghua.org.cn;
zhaozm@tsinghua.edu.cn; liujianzheng@263.net).
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TEC.2007.895461
implementation, but its accuracy is low because the perturba-
tion process would make the operation point of the PV panels
to oscillate around the maximum power point (MPP). Further-
more, when insolation changes rapidly, the perturb and observe
method would probably fail to track the MPP. The incremental
conductance method offers good performance under the condi-
tions of rapidly changing insolation. However, high complexity
of the method requires high sampling accuracy and fast control
speed, which adds to the cost of the total system.
Generally, a grid-connected PVsystemhas two control loops.
The inner loop is a pulse width modulation (PWM) loop, which
modulates output currents of the inverter, to meet the require-
ments of the waveformand phase. The outer loop determines the
output power of the inverter according to the MPP of PV panels.
Conventionally, these two loops are realized respectively in two
stages of power conversion [7]. One is a dc/dc converter with
MPPT control and the other is a dc/ac inverter. But two stages
may result in more power loss than that of the single-stage con-
version. In single-stage grid-connected PV systems, both loops
are realized simultaneously in one power conversion stage, thus,
simplifying the system topology. However, to maintain the si-
nusoidal waveform of output currents, the minimum period to
change the reference output power should be half of the grid
voltage period, thus, the outer loop here has a much lower speed
than that of the PWM loop. To maintain the system stability, the
MPPT method should be modied to work at low speed.
This paper presents a modied incremental conductance
MPPT method applied in a single-stage grid-connected PV sys-
tem [8]. With voltage and current sensors, the controller adopt-
ing this method calculates the recent power point of PV panels
and decides the output power of the inverter. To avoid voltage
collapse phenomena, the minimumstep length to modify the ref-
erence value of the output power varies according to the tracking
direction. However, because the tracking speed is limited by the
step length and the control period, the variable-step method still
cannot assure the stability of the dc-link voltage when there is a
rapid change of insolation. In the modied method, if the output
power of PVpanels is detected to be decreasing rapidly, the con-
troller will presume that a step change of insolation occurs, and
then, reset the reference output power of the inverter according
to the current PV output power. The control objective of this
method is to balance the input and output current of the dc-link
capacitor and maintain its voltage so as to track the MPP for
maximizing the energy capture.
Generally, a single-stage grid-connected PV system consists
of voltage and current sensors, a power electronic converter, and
0885-8969/$25.00 2007 IEEE
882 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION, VOL. 22, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2007
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the proposed grid-connected PV system. v
PV
:
output voltage of PV panels; i
PV
: output current of PV panels; i
PV U/V/W
:
output currents of the inverter in three phases; i
GRID U/V/W
: currents drawn
from grid in three phases; i
LOAD U/V/W
: local load currents in three phases;
S
1
S
6
: switching devices in the inverter; C: dc-link capacitor; L
U/V/W
:
inverter output lters.
a control system with a DSP or micro controller unit (MCU).
If load current sensors are included, the PV system can also
serve as a static var generator to compensate reactive power of
local load. Integration of a reactive power compensation unit
in the system can reasonably improve system performance with
few additional costs. The proposed PV system in this paper has
realized the function of detecting and compensating reactive
power.
The proposed grid-connected PV system consists of PV pan-
els, an inverter, a controller, and lters, which will be discussed
in Section II. Section III will introduce the electrical character-
istics of PV panels and discuss the operation principle of the
modied MPPT method. Simulation of the stability will also be
presented to explain the performance of this MPPT method in
Section IV. Section Vwill discuss the implementation of a reac-
tive power compensation unit in the system. The experimental
results and conclusions will be included in the Sections VI and
VI1, respectively.
II. OVERALL SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
The proposed three-phase single-stage grid-connected PV
systemconsists of PVpanels, an inverter, a controller, and lters,
which is shown in Fig. 1.
In the proposed grid-connected PVsystem, output currents of
the inverter are the control objects of MPPT, PWM, and reactive
compensation. Currents drawn from grid or local load currents
also need to be sampled for the calculation of local reactive
load.
III. PROPOSED MODIFIED MPPT METHOD
Fig. 2(a) and (b) shows the simulated I V and P V char-
acteristics of the ideal PV panels, respectively. The series of
Fig. 2. Simulated characteristics of PV panels under different insolation con-
ditions. (a) I V characteristics. (b) P V characteristics.
curves show the output characteristics under different insola-
tion conditions [9], [10].
The output voltage, current, and power of the PV panels
in the grid-connected system are dened as V
PV
, I
PV
, and
P
PV
, respectively. When the PV panels operate at the MPP,
(1) must be satised. In a PV system, see Fig. 2(b), there are
three kinds of operating states, which are discussed herein as
follows.
1) If (2) is true, the PV panels operate in the voltage-source
region, and the reference output power of the inverter
P
REF
should be increased to approach the MPP.
2) If (3) is true, the PV panels operate in the current-source
region, and P
REF
should be decreased rapidly to avoid a
voltage collapse and to approach the MPP simultaneously.
3) If (1) is true, P
REF
should be unchanged since the PV
panels operate already at the optimal point.
Also
P
PV
V
PV
=
(V
PV
I
PV
)
V
PV
= V
PV
I
PV
V
PV
+I
PV
V
PV
V
PV
= 0 (1)
V
PV
I
PV
V
PV
+I
PV
V
PV
V
PV
< 0 (2)
V
PV
I
PV
V
PV
+I
PV
V
PV
V
PV
> 0. (3)
In the proposed single-stage PV system, if the reference out-
put power of the inverter is increased or decreased by a xed
step length, the method could be called a constant-step MPPT
LIBO et al.: SINGLE-STAGE THREE-PHASE GRID-CONNECTED PV SYSTEM 883
Fig. 3. Simulation of the constant-step MPPT method (steady state). (a) PV
output power. (b) Inverter output current.
method. Fig. 3 shows the steady-state simulation waveforms of
a single-stage grid-connected PV system with the constant-step
MPPT method. The PV panels in simulation are 300 W
P
(peak
watt), 23-V open voltage, and 17 V at the MPP. The dc-link
capacitance is 2200 uF.
Fig. 3 shows that, in a steady state, the constant-step MPPT
method can balance the input and output current of the dc-link
capacitor, so as to track the MPP of PV panels. The PV output
power is very close to the maximum power.
The MPPT control objective in PV systems is to regulate
the actual operating voltage of the PV panels according to the
voltage at MPP, by adjusting the output power of the inverter.
In the tracking process, if the operating voltage of PV panels is
greater than the MPP voltage, the systemcontroller will increase
the output power of the grid-connected inverter to pull it down;
if the operating voltage of PV panels is less than the MPP
voltage, the system controller will decrease the output power of
the grid-connected inverter to push it up. However, in the latter
case, if insolation decreases at the same time, after the value
of P
REF
has been set lower, inverter output power may be still
greater than the actual PV output power, which will pull down
the dc-link voltage further. From Fig. 2(b), when the operating
point of PV panels moves from MPP to its left side, the output
power will decrease at the same time, which will cause the
dc-link voltage to collapse nally.
To avoid a dc-link voltage collapse phenomenon in the PV
grid-connected system, a novel MPPT method with a variable-
step method is proposed. The modication of this method fo-
cuses on the closed-loop control of power. The modied method
can fulll the requirement of high efciency and high stability.
When the insolation of sunlight is smooth and steady, the
tracking process of the modied MPPT method is similar to the
constant-step MPPT method. Both of themtrack the MPP of PV
panels by increasing or decreasing the reference output power of
Fig. 4. Flow process diagram for determination of P
REF
in the modied
MPPT method.
the inverter. The difference between themis that, in the modied
method, the step length is different in the increasing case and the
decreasing case. In the increasing case, it is smaller. Therefore,
when P
REF
exceeds the current maximum output power of PV
panels, the system controller can rapidly decrease it so as to
maintain dc-link voltage, to operate PV panels near its MPP,
and to assure the system stability.
However, when there is an insolation disturbance or step
change of sunlight, decreasing P
REF
by a large step length
still cannot assure the stability of the dc-link voltage.
In the modied method, the systemcontroller samples the PV
output voltage V
PV
and current I
PV
, and then calculates output
power P
PV
. If P
PV
is detected to be decreasing rapidly, the
controller will presume that a step change of insolation occurs,
and the reference value of inverter output power will be reset
according to the current PV output. This method can keep the
system operating stably in an insolation step change process.
Fig. 4 is the ow process diagram for determination of P
REF
in the modied MPPT method. P is the step change threshold
value of PVpanels output power, P
1
is the minimumstep length
to modify P
REF
, K is a constant with a value greater than 1,
and P
0
is the PV output power in the previous control period.
In the simulation, K is set between 2 and 3.
IV. STABILITY COMPARISON
To test the stability of the proposed modied MPPT method,
the simulation results of a single-stage grid-connected PV sys-
tem that uses the modied method are compared to the results
of the constant-step method.
884 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION, VOL. 22, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2007
Fig. 5. Simulation of the dc link voltage collapse process. (a) Step change of
insolation. (b) The dc-link voltage collapse process.
Fig. 5 shows a simulated dc-link voltage collapse process in
the PVsystemwith the constant-step method. FromFig. 5, when
there is a negative step change of insolation for 0.1 s, P
REF
will
deviate from the current MPP of PV panels, which will pull
down the dc-link voltage until the inverter output current is
distorted. The voltage of the dc-link capacitor will rise slowly
after its input and output currents balance again.
The modied MPPT method is also simulated to test its sta-
bility. Circuit parameters are the same as the aforementioned
simulation. Fig. 6 shows the simulation waveforms of a track-
ing process during step change of insolation. Fig. 6 indicates
that systems with the modied method can detect step change
of insolation, modify the reference value of output power, and
prevent the dc-link voltage collapses. Simulation results show
that the system can remain stable in case of a 50% step change
of insolation. The high stability of the MPPT method will also
ensure the high efciency of the system by drawing the max-
imum power from the PV panels under different insolation
conditions.
V. REACTIVE POWER COMPENSATION UNIT
For three-phase power systems with sinusoidal voltages and
sinusoidal currents, quantities such as active power, reactive
Fig. 6. Simulation of tracking process during step change of insolation with
the modied MPPT method. (a) Step change of insolation. (b) dc-link voltage.
(c) Output current of inverter after insolation step change.
Fig. 7. Diagram of calculation for output current reference value in the three-
phase grid-connected PV system.
power, active current, and reactive current are conventionally
dened on the average concept. But for systems with unbal-
anced and distorted currents, average concept is not suitable.
The concept of instantaneous reactive power, which has been
established by Akagi et al. [11], provides an effective method
to calculate and compensate the reactive power for three-phase
systems.
In the proposed grid-connected PV system, the owchart for
the calculation of the output current reference value is shown in
LIBO et al.: SINGLE-STAGE THREE-PHASE GRID-CONNECTED PV SYSTEM 885
Fig. 8. Photographs of the experimental system. (a) Inverter in the proposed
PV system. (b) PV panels installed in Tsinghua University.
Fig. 9. Experimental waveform of dc-link voltage during a step change of
insolation.
Fig. 7, which includes both the MPPT algorithm and a reactive
power compensation unit.
In Fig. 7, the detected load currents i
LOAD U
, i
LOAD V
, and
i
LOAD W
are transformed into pq coordinates by the block
(Cpq) after the coordinate transformation. The dc compo-
nents i
p0
and i
q0
with extremely low-frequency components are
extracted from the currents i
p
and i
q
on pq coordinates by a
low-pass lter (LPF). They are then transformed into coor-
dinates again by the block Cpq
1
, after which the fundamental
currents i
F U
, i
F V
, and i
F W
are obtained by retransforming
Fig. 10. Experimental waveforms of the proposed three-phase grid-connected
PV system. (a) Output voltages and currents without reactive power com-
pensation. (b) Output voltages and currents with positive reactive power
compensation. (c) Output voltages and currents with negative reactive power
compensation. (d) Output current with deadbeat algorithm. (e) Currents drawn
from the grid.
886 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENERGY CONVERSION, VOL. 22, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2007
i
F
and i
F
into UV W coordinates. Finally, the reference
currents i
REF U
, i
REF V
, and i
REF W
are calculated by block
(CAL). The equations are listed as follows:

i
REF U
= i
LOAD U
i
F U
+i
PV U
i
REF V
= i
LOAD V
i
F V
+i
PV V
i
REF W
= i
LOAD W
i
F W
+i
PV W
.
(4)
With the proposed method, it is simple to determine the ref-
erence currents of the three-phase grid-connected PV inverter
with minute uctuations.
VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Based on the earlier theoretical analysis, a 300-W
P
experi-
mental system was designed and implemented. Fig. 8 presents
photographs of the inverter and PV panels in the proposed PV
system that was installed on the West Main Building, Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China.
The experimental waveform of the proposed modied MPPT
method applied in the single-stage grid-connected PV system is
shown in Fig. 9. After a step change of insolation, the MPPT
controller can maintain the dc-link voltage and keep it close to
the MPP. In Fig. 10, experimental waveforms of the proposed
PV system are shown. A deadbeat control algorithm [12] is also
employed in the systemfor PWMgeneration. The current wave-
form of the inverter adopting this deadbeat algorithm is shown
in Fig. 10(d). The currents drawn from the grid are included in
Fig. 10(e) to indicate that there is no reactive power drawn from
the grid after the compensation.
VII. CONCLUSION
Implementation of a single-stage three-phase grid-connected
PV system is presented in this paper. The novel modied MPPT
method applied in the system can remarkably improve system
stability during rapidly changing process of insolation. Due to its
improvement on the dynamic response, the step length of output
power reference is reduced, which can also increase the steady-
state accuracy of the method. A reactive power compensation
unit based on the instantaneous reactive power theory is also
realized in the same system, which can compensate the reactive
power of local load without increasing total system cost.
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Wu Libo received the B.S.E.E., M.S.E.E., and Ph.D.
degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in
2001, 2003, and 2006, respectively.
His current research interests include power elec-
tronics applications, inverter design, and stand-alone
and grid-connected photovoltaic systems.
Zhao Zhengming (M02SM03) was born in Hu-
nan, China. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. de-
grees in electrical engineering from Hunan Univer-
sity, Changsha, China, in 1982 and 1985, respec-
tively, and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua Univer-
sity, Beijing, China, in 1991.
He was in the Department of Electrical Engineer-
ing, Tsinghua University, where he is currently a
Professor. From 1994 to 1996, he was a Postdoc-
toral Fellow at the Ohio State University. He has also
been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Califor-
nia at Irvine. His current research interests include power electronics and motor
control, high power conversion, motor design and drive, adaptive parameter
identication, solar energy applications, etc.
Liu Jianzheng received the B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E.
degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in
1985 and 1988, respectively.
He is currently an Associate Professor in the De-
partment of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua Uni-
versity. His current research interests include power
electronics applications, grid-connected photovoltaic
systems, and wind generation systems.