Decongestion of Active Distribution Grids via D-PMUs-based Reactive Power Control and Electric Vehicle Chargers

Abstract

This chapter presents an application to increase the operational flexibility of active distribution grids (DGs) by exploiting the potential of electric vehicle (EV) chargers. EV chargers are flexible resources available in modern DGs with the ability to decongest and increase the network capacity, using a grid-side controller to coordinate the reactive power injection. Therefore, a new reactive power flow management framework, including the individual injection capacity of EV chargers along with the DG is proposed in this work. The proposed hierarchical control architecture may intelligently handle voltage regulation, even when measurements are made at different nodes than the point of common coupling (PCC) between the EV chargers and the grid, by taking advantage of time-synchronized measurement devices remotely allocated. A typical linear quadratic Gaussian control structure that employs a data-driven system identification technique is adopted to coordinately provide the injection of reactive power from EV chargers to precisely and timely regulate the dynamic voltage response in DGs. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposal are demonstrated by employing simulated scenarios on the IEEE 13-node test feeder, illustrating that the plan can compensate for voltage variations under highly unbalanced conditions in short time.