Distributed Real-Time Voltage Regulation in Distribution Networks

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/m613mx81f

Abstract

The increasing penetration of renewable and distributed energy resources (DERs) in distribution networks call for fast and efficient distributed voltage regulation algorithms. This thesis first studies the existing local Volt/VAR control and designs new local algorithms with less restrictive convergence conditions and better voltage regulation. Meanwhile, unlike the traditional assets owned and managed by utility companies, the customer-owned DERs are not necessarily subject to the control of network operators unless properly incentivized. This thesis then investigates the joint design of distributed control and incentive mechanisms for managing DERs by introducing a market-based voltage regulation framework and extending it to a real-time setting with both continuous and discrete decision variables as well as device dynamics under time-varying operating conditions. The resulting randomized distributed algorithm admits asynchronous implementation in practical systems, and its performance is analytically characterized as well as numerically evaluated.

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