Abstract
With the increased installation of single-phase rooftop PV systems, in-house battery storage units, and high-power plug-in loads (i.e., EVs) at single-phase residential sites, it is prevalent that an increasing number of residential distribution systems are becoming severely unbalanced, causing power quality problems and thermal risks at distribution sub-stations. While different techniques have been investigated to resolve this issue, there is still a lack of adequate theoretical foundations to guide these approaches. In this study, a detailed analytical analysis is carried out for a typical North American residential community with single-phase power generation, storage, and high-power random plug-in loads. This analysis has laid the foundation for a class of operating scenarios and provides an essential theoretical basis to unify different techniques for dynamically balancing single-phase microgrids connected to three-phase distribution systems. Detailed formulations have been developed for the first time to draw explicit power transfer relationships among power surplus and power-deficient phases to achieve an overall dynamic balance. A user-friendly, free interactive online tool has also been developed for potential users to evaluate their own application scenarios.
Highlights
There has been a tremendous surge in the number of installations of residential rooftop PV systems over the past few years [1]. Because these systems are often connected to one phase of a three-phase system, conventional passive residential distribution networks have gradually evolved into active networks of local phase generation, causing a high degree of phase imbalance [2]
If the unused power capacity (UPC) of a microgrid falls below a threshold value, i.e. an overload state, the intertie switch between microgrids closes for power transfer
It is important to note that both intra and inter-phase power management schemes still work while extra power is imported from the grid
Summary
There has been a tremendous surge in the number of installations of residential rooftop PV systems (with local storage) over the past few years [1]. An effective control strategy needs to be developed for single-phase converters to achieve the required goals of power management under the proposed architecture. One of these techniques is the use of a multi-segment droop control technique [24]–[26] This approach works only for balanced three-phase systems, and its effectiveness is limited in residential microgrids possessing diverse, independent phase-wise power generation, distributed storage, and different load profiles in each phase. The relationship among three singlephase microgrids are analyzed, a set of formulas have been developed to determine the right amount of power needs to be transferred among these single-phase microgrids to establish a balanced three-phase microgrid under various operating conditions.
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