Optimal reactive power flow procedure to set up an effective local voltage control

Abstract

These days, due to distributed generation increasing, the operation and control of active distribution grid becomes complicated. Thus, their voltage control is the main topic of many research papers recently. While network reinforcement mitigated voltage rise in passive distribution networks, local voltage control, coordinated voltage control and centralized voltage control have been studied in several research papers. However, many of these approaches need plenty of sensors to gather large number of measurements that could cause complexity. This paper presents a new procedure to set up a local voltage control law devoted to properly manage the voltage profile (e.g. minimizing losses on MV feeders and increasing grid hosting capacity), without relying on advanced telecommunication architectures. The final goal of this paper is in a procedure that could be directly adopted in the today in place electric distribution grids. In particular, the contribution proposed is a method to optimize, offline, the Q(V) characteristic curve of the local voltage control for distributed generation units. The approach proposed has been implemented and tested on a real-life distribution grid of an Italian mountain area, where overvoltage problems could seriously bound renewable exploitation.