Experimental Validation of Fully Distributed Peer-to-Peer Optimal Voltage Control with Minimal Model Requirements

TL;DR

This paper presents a peer-to-peer voltage control method for power distribution grids that requires minimal model information, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability through real-world testing and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a fully distributed, peer-to-peer voltage control scheme that operates with minimal model knowledge and validates its performance on real distribution feeders.

Findings

Effective voltage regulation achieved with peer-to-peer communication.

Controller works reliably on real-life asynchronous communication channels.

Scalability analysis shows the approach remains viable with increasing number of agents.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of voltage regulation in a power distribution grid using the reactive power injections of grid-connected power inverters. We first discuss how purely local voltage control schemes cannot regulate the voltages within a desired range under all circumstances and may even yield detrimental control decisions. Communication and, through that, coordination are therefore needed. On the other hand, short-range peer-to-peer communication and knowledge of electric distances between neighbouring controllers are sufficient for this task. We implement such a peer-to-peer controller and test it on a 400~V distribution feeder with asynchronous communication channels, confirming its viability on real-life systems. Finally, we analyze the scalability of this approach with respect to the number of agents on the feeder that participate in the voltage regulation task.