Coordinated online voltage management of distributed generation using network partitioning

• Network partitioning strategy for online voltage control of distribution network.
• Decentralized voltage control solution for large-scale distribution network.
• Voltage control via coordinated control of distributed generations in each partition.

Due to the increasing penetration level of renewable energy resources in distribution systems, a new approach for voltage and reactive power control needs to be developed to deal with the fluctuations caused by intermittent changes of these resources. This paper, at first proposes a systematic approach which splits distribution networks into several separate control areas to control the voltage profile of each area in an admissible time calculation which is necessary for online operation. Then to solve the voltage regulation problem, a new method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to be applied to each center using only zonal data and also to calculate the optimum reactive power set points of the distributed generations (DG) units in the related area. Finally, the results of the proposed method on IEEE 123-bus unbalanced test system in comparison with another method based on interior point algorithm in both decentralized and centralized manner demonstrate the ability and efficiency of the proposed method for online control of smart grids voltage profile.