Because of high cost of battery, BESS is not suitable for the situation when the demand of active power is less than that of reactive power. A novel STATCOM based on the hybrid cascaded multilevel converter is proposed to provide limited active power support. Meanwhile, this topology doesn't have the drawback of cascaded H-bridge BESS. The characteristic of output power for this topology is studied and the operating region of STATCOM, BESS and novel STATCOM is compared. Then this paper shows the traditional and improved control strategy for the novel STATCOM. At last, a simulation model is created in Matlab/Simulink and the simulation results are provided to verify the feasibility of proposed novel STATCOM.