Linear Decision Rules for Control of Reactive Power by Distributed Photovoltaic Generators

Abstract

The revised IEEE 1547 Standard together with the grid codes from several European countries require the contribution of photovoltaic inverters to the reactive power and voltage control of distribution networks. This paper presents a decentralized approach for controlling reactive power from a photovoltaic (PV) inverter through a linear decision rule that is in terms of the PV generated real power, conforming to standard characteristic curves in the German grid code. The linear decision rules are computed using an affinely adjustable robust counterpart of an optimal power flow type formulation, with the PV real power generation specified in an uncertainty interval. The robust solution, which is computed via convex quadratic programming, guarantees that both the voltage deviations and power loss will remain within their optimized bounds for all realizations of PV real power sampled from the uncertainty set. The proposed linear decision rules are compared with a local control method that seeks the same type of multiobjective optimization. Monte Carlo simulation results on meshed distribution networks with up to 830 nodes show the superiority of the proposed approach. © 1969-2012 IEEE.