Use of Smart Loads for Power Quality Improvement

Electric spring (ES) was originally proposed as a distributed demand-side management technology for making noncritical loads adaptive to the availability of intermittent renewable power generation. The second generation of ES, fed with batteries (ES-2) and associated with a noncritical load, can form a new kind of combined smart load and distributed energy storage technology for smart grids. With its four-quadrant operation, ES-2 is able to offer ancillary grid services in addition to its major functions of voltage and frequency regulation. This paper presents the operating principles and the input current control of ES-2 for power quality improvement such as power factor correction and harmonics reduction. The operating principles and the proposed input current control have been verified with the experimental results obtained from a small-scale power grid. Another weak single-phase power system fed by intermittent wind power is set up to prove the combined operation of ES-2 for power quality improvement and ES-1 (ES with capacitor storage) for voltage stabilization. The experimental results show that ES-2 with input current control can carry out power quality improvement as its ancillary function.