A review of reactive power compensation techniques in microgrids

Renewable energy based Distributed Generation (DG) has been the solution to researchers to combat the problem of increasing load. In DG based microgrids, the loads and generators are in the close vicinity to aid continuous power supply. However, the power electronic interfacing towards DG systems gives rise to some of the serious power quality problems, such as, the reactive power compensation and the generation of harmonics that pollutes the power distribution system. Reactive power compensation is becoming a challenging task to sustain an acceptable degree of power quality in microgrids due to tightly coupled generation and distribution. Therefore, current research is to cope up with the expanding microgrid system and mitigation of these concerned issues. Recent trends are geared towards the realization of multitasking devices to tackle several power quality problems simultaneously. Hence, the objective of this paper is to present an overview of a microgrid and its modeling utilizing the actual environmental data. Subsequently, the challenges and power quality issues faced in the microgrid are observed and succeeded by a review of compensation methods against these concerns using various control techniques, algorithms, and devices.