Distributed reactive power feedback control for voltage regulation and loss minimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed feedback control strategy for microgenerators in power grids to optimize reactive power injection, minimize losses, and regulate voltage, with proven convergence and demonstrated robustness.

Contribution

It presents a novel duality-based distributed control algorithm for reactive power management in power distribution networks, ensuring convergence and robustness.

Findings

Proven convergence of the control algorithm in both synchronous and asynchronous settings.

Simulations demonstrate effective loss minimization and voltage regulation.

The strategy is robust to asynchronous updates and measurement noise.

Abstract

We consider the problem of exploiting the microgenerators dispersed in the power distribution network in order to provide distributed reactive power compensation for power losses minimization and voltage regulation. In the proposed strategy, microgenerators are smart agents that can measure their phasorial voltage, share these data with the other agents on a cyber layer, and adjust the amount of reactive power injected into the grid, according to a feedback control law that descends from duality-based methods applied to the optimal reactive power flow problem. Convergence to the configuration of minimum losses and feasible voltages is proved analytically for both a synchronous and an asynchronous version of the algorithm, where agents update their state independently one from the other. Simulations are provided in order to illustrate the performance and the robustness of the algorithm, and the innovative feedback nature of such strategy is discussed.