Development of control technologies facilitates the integration of renewable energy sources to the grid through power electronic converters. In this study, the inverter acts as shunt active power filter along with the power conversion operation. Various sliding mode control (SMC) techniques namely relay and signum method, hysteresis method and equivalent control method are implemented to control the real, and reactive power flow between Renewable Energy System (RES), load and grid using an inverter. To reduce the complexity, the control law (u eq) for equivalent control method is derived using a simple singlephase equivalent circuit of a three-phase voltage source inverter. In this study, the robustness is enhanced by choosing the integral sliding surface. These controllers are used to reduce the total harmonic distortion (THD) and to ensure unity power factor (PF) in the grid during balanced and unbalanced grid voltage conditions even in the existence of nonlinear loads. The SMC using equivalent control function outperforms the other methods in terms of chattering, THD and PF. To illustrate the effectiveness, three different modes are considered: (i) no RES power, (ii) insufficient RES power and (iii) excess RES power. The performance of controllers is validated by the simulation and experimental results.