Application of reactive power compensation algorithm for large-scale street lighting

Abstract

LED-based street and road lighting installations generate reactive power, particularly when they are dynamically dimmed. It contributes to power loss and efficiency reduction of the grid. Reactive power can be compensated by installing additional dynamically connected inductors in lighting control cabinets. However such an approach significantly increases the cost of the lighting infrastructure. The goal of this paper is to propose another, low cost approach to reactive power compensation for dynamically dimmed lighting installations. It is based on connecting fixed settings inductors at lighting control cabinets. The inductors settings are calculated by the proposed algorithm for city-scale lighting systems. A synthetic benchmark example with 798 circuits and 14,019 luminaires confirms its applicability. The algorithm objective is to completely eliminate capacitive reactive power and to keep inductive reactive power within acceptable limits. It is an extended version of the ICCS 2020 paper [9].