Model predictive control of flexible demand for voltage support in unbalanced distribution systems
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Joo, Jhi-Young; Chava, Mounika; Sankur, Michael; Arnold, Daniel; Stewart, Emma
- Source
- 2017 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting Power & Energy Society General Meeting, 2017 IEEE. :1-5 Jul, 2017
- Subject
- Engineering Profession
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Manganese
Water heating
Voltage control
Load management
Resistance heating
Power demand
Temperature dependence
- Language
- ISSN
- 1944-9933
Voltage regulation is a longstanding operations and planning challenge for the distribution system. This paper presents a novel method to aggregate small active power loads to manage voltage in an unbalanced distribution system. The control is performed in two layers. First, a distribution management system solves an optimal power flow problem to dispatch active power curtailment within the bounds that aggregate loads at each node and phase can provide. Then the resulting curtailment amount is divided among individual devices to provide the requested active power by phase. The individual dispatch at the phase level is performed as a model predictive control in order to avoid disruptive operation of a device or infeasibility of the problem at later time steps. Simulations on an IEEE test system modified to include a number of electric water heaters show the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving under-voltages of the system.