Abstract
Aware of the fact that the installed PV capacity and its power production rapidly increased in the last decade, with the huge impact that has been done to the power system, the distortion effects for grid-connected PV systems with reference to different types of electric power quantities will be presented in this article. The impact of the frequent fluctuation of solar irradiance on the behavior of the grid-connected PV system, due to cloud movements and resulting shadows and in terms of power quality and the evaluation of power components, is the topic of analysis in this research. Besides the simulation results of certain study cases, an experimental evaluation of electric power quantities on an actual PV system in real weather conditions was also performed. The experimental setup, formed through the combination of a PC and multifunctional I/O board with an appropriate software solution, was established and used for obtaining the target results. The methodology used for the evaluation of electric power quantities relied on the current physical components (CPC) theory for power definition. The experimental results were obtained for three different cases, namely, the low, medium, and high solar irradiance cases. On the basis of these results, the conclusions about distortion effects are given.