Collaborative Reactive Power Control of Photovoltaic Power Generation Systems in a Future Distribution Network Based on Reactive Power Price

Future Japanese power grids will be supported by many photovoltaic (PV) generation systems installed in distribution networks as their essential components. However, they might make it difficult to keep the voltage profile appropriate in case that a large amount of power flows back from them. Although the voltage profile can be properly adjusted by power factor control, such a control gives economic disadvantage to the PV owners.In this paper the authors propose a new collaborative voltage control by monetary transactions among the PV owners. A new reactive pricing is proposed and studied using a simple distribution model. It is shown that the proposed incentive successfully increases the total income by coordination of reactive power output among them. The proposed system eventually increases the total income of the PV owners who contributed to the power factor control.