A Zonal Volt/VAR Control Mechanism for High PV Penetration Distribution Systems

Conference · Mon Jul 26 04:00:00 EDT 2021 · 2021 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/pesgm46819.2021.9637841· OSTI ID:2329500

Alrushoud, Asmaa ^[1]; McEntee, Catie; Lu, Ning

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1. North Carolina State University

This paper presents a zonal Volt/VAR control scheme for regulating voltage in unbalanced 3-phase distribution systems using inverter-based resources (IBR). First, the dependency between nodal voltage changes and IBR reactive power injections is derived via voltage sensitivity studies. Then, a fast-incremental clustering method is used to divide the distribution circuit into weakly-coupled zones based on correlations between nodal voltage sensitivities. The weak-coupling allows the voltage to be regulated independently within each zone using a rule-based voltage controller to dispatch IBR for voltage corrections. Simulation results on actual distribution feeder show that the proposed zone-based Volt/VAR control method maintains system voltages within their operational limits while reducing the runtime of the Volt/VAR controller from tens of second to a couple of milliseconds compared with centralized, optimization-based Volt/VAR control methods.

• Research Organization: North Carolina State University
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
• DOE Contract Number: EE0008770
• OSTI ID: 2329500
• Conference Information: Journal Name: 2021 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English