Autonomous Decentralized Voltage Profile Control Method Using Communication Function of Smart Meters in Distribution Systems

The introduction of renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaics or wind turbines, has been greatly promoted recently in order to improve the energy and environmental issues. In distribution systems with a large number of distributed generators, voltage profile management becomes one of serious problems due to the reverse power flow. Usual PCS (Power Conditioning System) reduces their active power output if they detect the voltage violation from the upper limit in order to get the voltage profile back to the proper range. However, since the magnitude of voltage fluctuation at the nodes with PCSs are different each other, there is a possibility that the amount of the curtailment are not the same among them. Hence, in this paper, we developed a new method which can solve the problem by using information exchange between PCSs using communication function of smart meters supposing the communication among them is available every 30 min. The proposed method was tested in 38-node model system and its effectiveness was shown.