A pricing method of reactive power considering communication function of smart meters in distribution systems

It is important to maintain the voltage profile in distribution systems with a large amount of distributed generators (DGs). Though it is effective to control reactive power to maintain voltage profile, there is a possibility that active power curtailment is needed. To solve this problem, the authors have developed so far the pricing method of reactive power controlled by DGs to give economic incentives for those DG owners. In order to realize the method in real-time, we suppose that measurement data by sensor switches are available to determine the pricing and the price signal can be sent to DG owners through smart meters. Based on the concept of "shallow", the required amount of resource in order to procure the reactive power is imposed to all the DG owners equally. The effectiveness of the proposed method was tested by numerical simulation by using a distribution system model consisting of one feeder line.