Steady-State Voltage Regulation With Reduced Photovoltaic Power Curtailment

Abstract

The curtailment of photovoltaic (PV) power injection is one of the ways to mitigate the overvoltage issue in residential distribution networks with high levels of PVs. The reactive power compensation (RPC) of PV inverter, when applied in conjunction with the active power curtailment (APC) of battery energy storage system (BESS), is more effective in improving the voltage profile. Hence, a coordinated power compensation algorithm (PCA) is proposed in this article to regulate the voltage and reduce the power curtailment while serving requisite load demand. Both RPC and APC are integrated to improve the voltage regulation margin in a low-voltage distribution network. Using bus voltage sensitivities, the integrated RPC and APC are performed on the most sensitive PV inverter and BESS for voltage regulation. The proposed PCA has a large capability in voltage regulation as it performs RPC before APC, reducing the amount of total PV power curtailment. Simulation studies are conducted on distribution feeders to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.