Reactive Power Compensation Using Electric Vehicle and Data Center by Integrating Virtual Power Plant

Abstract

This article proposes a virtual power plant (VPP) theory for reactive power support consisting of electric vehicle (EV) and data center (DC) UPS battery energy storage in the power system. As enhanced grid regulations have been developed to enable large-scale distributed generation, progressive controllers are required for reactive power control considering nonlinear and industrial type load. Data center batteries are deep cycle batteries; they discharge over a much longer time and EV batteries also have great potential to absorb/release electricity from/back to the grid when needed. This paper presents the bidirectional VPP operation with a novel virtual synchronous generator (VSG)-driven reactive power controller for reactive power support. Four case studies are performed in MATLAB/Simulink platform to evaluate the performance characteristics, which include grid import/export operations, time-varying nonlinear load conditions, nonlinear industrial load conditions, and transient disturbance conditions. The obtained results validate the reactive power support in all discussed case studies.