Optimal Local Volt/Var Control for Photovoltaic Inverters in Active Distribution Networks

Abstract

The penetration of photovoltaics (PVs) has been increasing in active distribution networks (ADN), which leads to severe voltage violation problems. PV inverters can provide fast and flexible reactive power support and are now allowed to participate in the voltage regulation process. This paper proposes a real-time combined central and local Volt/Var control (VVC) strategy to mitigate voltage violation problems while minimizing the network power loss. Based on the historical PV and load data, the load flow and optimal power flow are performed in the centralized controller (CC) to obtain multiple voltage and optimal power settings for each PV system. The local controller (LC) then generates voltage control curves with these optimal scatters. To improve the voltage control effect, a novel 3-Dimension voltage control curve is proposed considering both the measurements of node voltage and PV generation. Moreover, a data-driven deep convolution neural network is designed and trained to generate optimal local voltage control curves without prior knowledge of specific curve functions. The proposed approach is tested on the IEEE 33-bus distribution system and simulation results verify the effectiveness in voltage control compared with the optimal Q(V) and Q(P) method.