Options for Control of Reactive Power by Distributed Photovoltaic Generators
By K. Turitsyn, P. Šulc, Scott N. Backhaus, M. Chertkov. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2010
752 citations recorded by the source corpus.
High-penetration levels of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation on an electrical distribution circuit present several challenges and opportunities for distribution utilities. Rapidly varying irradiance conditions may cause voltage sags and swells that cannot be compensated by slowly responding utility equipment resulting in a degradation of power quality. Although not permitted under current standards for interconnection of distributed generation, fast-reacting, VAR-capable PV inverters may provide the necessary reactive power injection or consumption to maintain voltage regulation under difficult transient conditions. As side benefit, the control of reactive power injection at each PV inverter provides an opportunity and a new tool for distribution utilities to optimize the performance of distribution circuits, e.g., by minimizing thermal losses. We discuss and compare via simulation various design options for control systems to manage the reactive power generated by these inverters. An important design decision that weighs on the speed and quality of communication required is whether the control should be centralized or distributed (i.e., local). In general, we find that local control schemes are able to maintain voltage within acceptable bounds. We consider the benefits of choosing different local variables on which to control and how the control system can be continuously tuned between robust voltage control, suitable for daytime operation when circuit conditions can change rapidly, and loss minimization better suited for nighttime operation.
Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aacaae0cce5103058af30439bcd9abf78a8280ad
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Citations in the corpus
- Voltage Stability and Reactive Power Sharing in Inverter-Based Microgrids With Consensus-Based Distributed Voltage Control (2016, background): “In conventional distribution systems, these devices are additionally inserted in the system to improve its performance with respect to reactive power consumption [10], [23].”
- Convex Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow—Part I: Formulations and Equivalence (2014, background): “, [40], [41]; or what to do when relaxation fails, e.”
- Resilient Disaster Recovery Logistics of Distribution Systems: Co-Optimize Service Restoration With Repair Crew and Mobile Power Source Dispatch (2018, neutral): “The LinDistFlow model has been extensively used in [3] and [57]–[60] with radially operated DSs.”
- Energy Crowdsourcing and Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Blockchain-Enabled Smart Grids (2019, methodology): “Another way of making CES-OPF more computationally tractable is to replace the convexified branch flow model with the LinDistFlow(zt) model [40] which is linear in zt; this transforms CES-OPF to a quadratic program that can be solved for large-scale networks.”
- A Distributed Control Strategy for Reactive Power Compensation in Smart Microgrids (2011, neutral): “The available results in this sense are mainly supported by heuristic approaches [20], or they follow suboptimal criteria for sharing an aggregate reactive power command [21], and in some cases do not implement any communication or synergistic behavior of the microgenerators [22].”
- Convex Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow—Part II: Exactness (2014, background): “It includes the case where s j are subject to simple box constraints, but also allows constraints of the form | s j | 2 ≤ a , | ∠ s j | ≤ φ j that is useful for volt/var control [47], or q j ∈ { 0 , a } for capacitor configurations.”