Voltage Support for Critical Buses with Consensus Control of Electric Springs in Distribution Systems

In modern society, some energy consumers have a higher requirement on power quality than others and technological advances can allow for this. However, at the distribution level, as more renewable energy penetrates into the system and increases the voltage fluctuations which maybe unacceptable for the critical customers. The voltage fluctuation problem of such critical buses is hard to solve by traditional methods. With the introduction of the new smart load device, the electric spring, the network voltages of the distribution system with high renewable penetration can be better regulated. This paper proposes a voltage management scheme for the critical buses to maintain their desired voltage profile. In the control scheme, the voltage regulation responsibility is shared among the electric springs (ES) in a distributed way via consensus control, which is suitable for a system with limited communication capabilities. The proposed operation method of the ES is not constrained by the network topologies while compensating the inflexibility of traditional voltage control methods, such as tap-changers and capacitor banks. The proposed management scheme is verified on a modified IEEE 15-bus distribution network. The results show that the ES can work together to maintain the voltage of the critical buses by sharing the responsibility in the proposed scheme.