Impedance-Based Stability Criterion for Grid-Connected Inverters

Grid-connected inverters are known to become unstable when the grid impedance is high. Existing approaches to analyzing such instability are based on inverter control models that account for the grid impedance and the coupling with other grid-connected inverters. A new method to determine inverter-grid system stability using only the inverter output impedance and the grid impedance is developed in this paper. It will be shown that a grid-connected inverter will remain stable if the ratio between the grid impedance and the inverter output impedance satisfies the Nyquist stability criterion. This new impedance-based stability criterion is a generalization to the existing stability criterion for voltage-source…