Decentralized Voltage Control to Minimize Distribution Power Loss of Microgrids

Abstract

Microgrids that integrate renewable power sources are suitable for rural communities or certain military applications such as forward operation bases. For microgrids that are not connected to the large electric grid, new control strategies must be designed to maintain proper grid voltage and frequency. In addition, microgrids with distributed power sources and load nodes may have frequent reconfiguration in grid architecture. Therefore, the control strategies ideally should be “plug-and-play”, i.e., they should not require significant communication or architecture information, and they should work reliably as long as the supply/demand powers are reasonably balanced. Another unique issue of microgrids is the high resistance loss in distribution lines due to the low operating voltage. To reduce power losses, appropriate voltage control at distributed nodes is required which again must work in a plug-and-play fashion. In this paper, we propose a decentralized voltage control algorithm that minimizes power losses for microgrids. Its optimality and plug-and-play nature are demonstrated through comprehensive simulations.