Harmonic Analysis of PV Inverter-Based EV Charging Station Activity on the Utility Grid

The use of electric vehicles (EV) is increasing day by day due to the commitment of various countries to reduce carbon emissions from the use of conventional vehicles based on fossil fuels. The use of solar energy at EV charging stations will reduce carbon emissions more significantly compared to the public grid which is still dominated by coal fuel at present. The development of EV charging stations integration with the grid and photovoltaic (PV) PV inverter can cause power quality problems such as harmonics. This is due to the use of DC/AC or AC/DC converters on the PV EV charging station side which contains distortion in the voltage and current waveform. In this paper, the effect of adding PV inverter-based electric vehicle charging stations to an electric power distribution network is presented. The simulation results show that there is an increase in current and voltage harmonics with the use of a PV inverter compared to a charging system using a grid.