Analysis of Fairness-promoting Optimization Schemes of Photovoltaic Curtailments for Voltage Regulation in Power Distribution Networks

TL;DR

This paper compares two fairness-promoting optimization schemes for PV curtailment in power networks, analyzing their effectiveness in balancing voltage regulation and equitable PV power reduction.

Contribution

It combines and extensively analyzes two existing fairness schemes, providing comparative insights on their performance in various network scenarios.

Findings

Both schemes improve fairness compared to baseline methods.

The feedback-based scheme adapts better to changing conditions.

Trade-offs exist between fairness and total curtailment levels.

Abstract

Active power curtailment of photovoltaic (PV) generation is commonly exercised to mitigate over-voltage issues in power distribution networks. However, fairness concerns arise as certain PV plants may experience more significant curtailments than others depending on their locations within the network. Existing literature tackles this issue through fairness-promoting/aware optimization schemes. These schemes can be broadly categorized into two types. The first type maximizes an additional fairness objective along with the main objective of curtailment minimization. The second type is formulated as a feedback controller, where fairness is accounted for by assigning different weights (as feedback) in the curtailment minimization objective for each PV plant based on previous curtailment actions. In this work, we combine these two schemes and provide extensive analyses and comparisons of these two fairness schemes. We compare the performance in terms of fairness and net curtailments for several benchmark test networks.