Optimal inverter VAR control in distribution systems with high PV penetration

By Masoud Farivar, R. Neal, C. Clarke, Steven H. Low. IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, 2011

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The intent of the study detailed in this paper is to demonstrate the benefits of inverter var control on a fast timescale to mitigate rapid and large voltage fluctuations due to the high penetration of photovoltaic generation and the resulting reverse power flow. Our approach is to formulate the volt/var control as a radial optimal power flow (OPF) problem to minimize line losses and energy consumption, subject to constraints on voltage magnitudes. An efficient solution to the radial OPF problem is presented and used to study the structure of optimal inverter var injection and the net benefits, taking into account the additional cost of inverter losses when operating at non-unity power factor. This paper will illustrate how, depending on the circuit topology and its loading condition, the inverter's optimal reactive power injection is not necessarily monotone with respect to their real power output. The results are demonstrated on a distribution feeder on the Southern California Edison system that has a very light load and a 5 MW photovoltaic (PV) system installed away from the substation.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31bef694bbc2236c9a9b968738b77addf5302c5a

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Citations in the corpus

Exact Convex Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow in Radial Networks (2013, background): “Topologies of the SCE 47-bus and 56-bus networks [30], [49].”
Feeder Reconfiguration in Distribution Networks Based on Convex Relaxation of OPF (2015, background): “Test networks 3 and 4 are from Southern California Edition with renewable generations and taken from [17], [26].”
An Optimal and Distributed Method for Voltage Regulation in Power Distribution Systems (2012, methodology): “Although, a direct comparison of both works is difficult due to the difference in assumptions and constraints (for example [24] does not require all buses to have DERs), the solution method proposed by the authors in [24] is also globally optimal; however, their solution method requires a centralize”
On the Secondary Control Architectures of AC Microgrids: An Overview (2020, methodology): “We refer to [156] and [157] for analogous”
Distributed and Decentralized Voltage Control of Smart Distribution Networks: Models, Methods, and Future Research (2017, neutral): “A SOCP relaxation of the OPF is proposed for reactive dispatch of the PV inverters in an attempt to minimize losses as well as energy consumption through conservation voltage reduction [49].”
Active Management of Low-Voltage Networks for Mitigating Overvoltages Due to Photovoltaic Units (2016, background): “Other objectives include minimizing the voltage profile deviation from [9], the transformer tap changer switching [10], or the network losses [11], [12].”
Fast Local Voltage Control Under Limited Reactive Power: Optimality and Stability Analysis (2015, methodology): “With the full system information available centrally, the VAR control problem can be cast as an optimal power flow (OPF) one that minimizes system operational costs such as power losses and voltage violation [6].”