A Distributed Strategy for Volt/VAR Control in Distribution Networks: A Smart Buildings Approach

Abstract

The advent of distributed energy resources (DERs) at the distribution and consumer level imposes imperative operation challenges for distribution utilities. Novel strategies have been proposed to use the thermal inertia of buildings to provide ancillary services to the grid to tackle the problems posed by increasing penetration of renewable energy sources. Synthetic inertia and control of energy storage systems (ESS) have been proposed to improve transient stability with increased penetration of renewable energy sources. The aforementioned strategies deal with frequency control and only consider modulation of active power of the loads or ESS and don’t consider the voltage control problem. Hitherto, the effect of the power modulation of loads’ reactive power consumption on the grid’s voltage profile has not been studied to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, a multi-agent distributed control (MADC) strategy for Volt/VAR control in distribution networks to provide reactive power support from smart buildings to improve power quality at distribution level is presented. The robustness of this strategy is validated on a modified IEEE 13 bus system. The results show that, for short periods, this can be a valuable strategy to tackle the nominal voltage range violations on electrical distribution networks (EDN).