A Stochastic Game Approach for Distributed Voltage Regulation Among Autonomous PV Prosumers

Abstract

The complex voltage variation is an emerging issue caused by the large-scale distributed energy resources (DERs) integration and the forming prosumers. The prosumers with uncertain photovoltaic (PV) generation will serve as autonomous entities for distributed voltage regulation, which have interaction during the voltage regulation process and have not been fully researched. This paper proposed a stochastic game approach for distributed voltage regulation based on autonomous PV prosumers, where the interactive prosumers’ PV uncertainties are formulated as a dynamic process during the voltage regulation. An economic incentive-based voltage regulation model is built for autonomous prosumers, which takes the reactive power as strategies and considers the PV curtailment, reactive power compensations, and PV uncertainties. The Markov decision process is adopted, and the approach of changing discrete PV uncertainties to continuous probability distribution is proposed to solve the stochastic game model, while dealing with the “curse of dimensionality” issue arising from the PV uncertainties. Finally, the case study is conducted on the IEEE 33 and 118 node system with real data, and the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed voltage regulation method in terms of the nodal voltage, prosumers’ utility, PV uncertainties management, and scalability.