A coordinated control strategy of electric spring based smart load technology

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of distributed renewable energy sources and single-phase electrical equipment, the issue of voltage fluctuation and power imbalance become more critical problems that need to be resolved urgently. The so-called demand side management (DSM) provides the opportunity for the distribution system to intelligently balance the power between grid side and demand side. As one of the crucial roles of DSM, smart loads are naturally committed to manage the power flow of the distribution network. Different to the conventional passive smart load technologies, the electric springs (ES) provide an opportunity to turn part of the traditional loads into adaptive smart load without the need for communication. In this paper, a novel coordinated control strategy of ES based smart load is presented, other than the previous ES which offer single function, the ES with proposed control strategy can achieve both voltage stabilization and power balance functions via dynamic active power and reactive power regulation. A test system with different ES model is built in MATLAB/Simulink for system simulation, and a comparison is made between proposed and existed control strategies. The simulation results validated the effectiveness of this multiobjective coordinated control strategy of ES for solving complex power quality issues.