Inverter VAR control for distribution systems with renewables

By Masoud Farivar, C. Clarke, Steven H. Low, K. Chandy. IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications, 2011

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivated by the need to cope with rapid and random fluctuations of renewable generation, we presents a model that augments the traditional Volt/VAR control through switched controllers on a slow timescale with inverter control on a fast timescale. The optimization problem is generally nonconvex and therefore hard to solve. We propose a simple convex relaxation and prove that it is exact provided over-satisfaction of load is allowed. Hence Volt/VAR control over radial networks is efficiently solvable. Simulations of a real-world distribution circuit illustrates that the proposed inverter control achieves significant improvement over the IEEE 1547 standard in terms of power quality and power savings.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9f9987177a6f0a37c218c2e7f91a9261ada975c

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In Control and Systems Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Distribution Locational Marginal Pricing (DLMP) for Congestion Management and Voltage Support (2018, background): “For inverter-based DGs, such as distributed wind turbines (WTs) and photovoltaics (PVs), they can not only provide active power but also absorb or generate reactive power through controlling the smart inverters [21].”
Physics of power networks makes hard optimization problems easy to solve (2012, result): “A similar result is also derived in [32] using a different formulation for the OPF problem.”
Convex relaxation of optimal power flow: A tutorial (2013, neutral): “SOCP relaxation for OPF seems to be first observed in [47] for the bus injection model and in [48] for the branch flow model.”
Convex Models of Distribution System Reconfiguration (2012, background): “We also remark that a tight SOCP relaxation of the DistFlow equations exists [33].”
PowerModels.J1: An Open-Source Framework for Exploring Power Flow Formulations (2017, background): “, Moment-Hierarchy [4], SDP [5], QC [6], SOC [7], CDF [8]), which provide solution quality guarantees and leverage state-of-the-art convex optimization software.”
Convex Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow—Part II: Exactness (2014, methodology): “It is ﬁrst proposed in [16] and [17] as an SOCP for radial networks in the branch ﬂow model of [18] and [19].”
Feeder Reconfiguration in Distribution Networks Based on Convex Relaxation of OPF (2015, methodology): “Test networks 3 and 4 are from Southern California Edition with renewable generations and taken from [17], [26].”
Convex Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow—Part I: Formulations and Equivalence (2014, neutral): “5”
Optimal inverter VAR control in distribution systems with high PV penetration (2011, positive): “Second, in (26), we have used the over-satisfaction of active and reactive loads (see [1], [7]) .”
Business models for distributed energy resources: A review and empirical analysis (2017, background): “Furthermore, Volt/VAR Control through PV inverters has been shown to enable conservation voltage reduction and line loss reduction, leading to significant power savings [80].”
The Power Grid Library for Benchmarking AC Optimal Power Flow Algorithms (2019, methodology): “The following mathematical model presents a variant of the AC-OPF problem that is often used in related AC-OPF publications (e.g. [1]–[5], [11], [15]) and is readily encoded in the M ATPOWER network data format.”
A Survey of Distributed Optimization and Control Algorithms for Electric Power Systems (2017, methodology): “An SOCP relaxation can be formulated in terms of the DistFlow model (3) variables [14], [15], [26].”
Exact Convex Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow in Radial Networks (2013, neutral): “If the solution of the SDP relaxation is feasible for the OPF problem, then a global optimum of the OPF problem can be recovered.”