An Enhanced Voltage Control Method for Fair Active Power Curtailment of Rooftop PV Systems in LV Distribution Networks

Abstract

Solutions based on active power curtailment (APC) of photovoltaic inverters (PVIs) have been effectively used to alleviate overvoltages in low-voltage distribution networks (LVDNs) due to real power injection supplied by rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems. However, volt–watt control methods presently available can lead to unfair APC among the PVIs, penalizing financially customers located far away from the distribution transformer of the LVDN. This paper proposes an innovative real-time voltage control method to address the unfair APC issue in LVDNs with rooftop PV systems. The proposed method is based on a centralized control architecture to calculate two fair curtailment factors for all PVIs of the LVDN. Additionally, to explore the extended communication infrastructure brought by centralized control architecture, this paper proposes a novel simplified method to compute the voltage sensitivity matrix (VSM) for applications on unbalanced three-phase LVDNs. Performance tests were conducted on a set of LVDNs, evaluating the effectiveness and fairness of APC quantitatively using Jain’s Fairness Index (JFI) as a metric. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed control method for mitigating the overvoltage issue, ensuring fairness by presenting average JFI values close to one (the maximum allowed value). Furthermore, in comparison to conventional VWC strategies, penalties arising from the local dependence of PVIs on APC were eliminated for both curtailment factors. Finally, an accuracy test was performed on the proposed VSM model, based on voltage estimation through the linearized model of LVDN at a specific operating point. The findings demonstrated outstanding accuracy, with an error of less than 0.2%, compared to voltage estimation via power flow.