ANALYSIS OF ELECTRICAL DISTURBANCES ON THE OPERATION OF THE 7 MW PHOTOVOLTAIC SOLAR POWER PLANT CONNECTED TO THE MALBAZA ELECTRICITY GRID (NIGER)

To increase the countrys energy production, the State of Niger has built a 7MW photovoltaic solar power plant connected to the grid of the Nigerien electricity company in the department of Malbaza, Tahoua region (130 583.54 North and 503111.95 East). In order to optimize the energy production of this plant, a study of electrical disturbances on the operation of the photovoltaic system has been conducted in this article. This was based on data on energy production as a function of irradiation and temperature, and electrical disturbances that caused a malfunction of the plant from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019. This analysis showed that, for an expected annual operating time of 4300.47hours, the solar plant operated normally at 95.37%. The remaining 4.43% comes from a disturbed regime linked to the grid (3.93%) and the solar power plant (0.7%). It has also been shown that the grid disturbances that caused the malfunction of the solar power plant are outages (83.02%), voltage fluctuations (8.03%), voltage dips (7.9%) and overvoltages (1.05%). At the solar power plant, two types of disturbances were recorded, including power failures (99.49%) and earth faults following current leaks (0.51%). Thus, the average annual availability of the grid is 95.58% and that of the power plant is 99.26%. The various results finally showed that apart from irradiation and temperature, grid availability is also a very important parameter to take into account in the energy production of a grid-connected photovoltaic system.