Due to the limitations and negative environmental impacts of fossil fuels, renewable energy resources have gained a lot of attention in recent years. Photovoltaic energy in particular has been widely adopted in both residential and industrial sectors. With the ever-increasing penetration of photovoltaic generation in the power grid, studies on the impact of these sources on the reliability of the power system becomes important, growingly. Such studies, however, require a thorough eva‎luation of the performance and reliability of the components of such systems and the factors affecting them. Although the uncertainty of solar radiation is one of the most important factors influencing the production of a photovoltaic system, the effect of other factors cannot be neglected. A photovoltaic system is composed of many components whose performance along with their relationship with each other, affects the performance and reliability of the whole system. Moreover, proper planning for the maintenance of these components can significantly improve the long-term performance and reliability of the system. In addition, in large-scale photovoltaic power plants, i.e., solar farms, the increase in the number of equipment and the increase of photovoltaic penetration in production have great impact on the photovoltaic system reliability and the adequacy of the power system in supplying the load, respectively. In this thesis, the effect of photovoltaic penetration on power system adequacy indices has been investigated. For this purpose, the effect of different factors such as solar radiation uncertainty, components’ failure rate, system structures, repairability, and rated power on the reliability of the photovoltaic system are eva‎luated. Then, using the RBTS standard test system, adequacy indices of the generation system are eva‎luated and analyzed. In this research, the universal generating function (UGF) method has been introduced and used as a suitable method to eva‎luate the reliability of photovoltaic systems and the adequacy of power system in the presence of photovoltaic production. This method, due to having two important features of like-term collection and recursive approach, is a suitable method for eva‎luating the reliability of large and complex systems, which has shown its efficiency in this work.

اكبر ابراهيمي

حميدرضا كارشناس، محمدامين لطيفي