A reactive power compensation strategy in radial distribution network with high PV penetration

The introduction of photovoltaics (PV) based power generation has brought about the trend of residential rooftop PVs. Therefore the concept of energy market of buying and selling of power between the utility and consumers has been established. However, high penetration of PV causes congestion leading to voltage violation conditions, especially in case of grid fault that requires islanding of the PV systems. Furthermore, in case of radial distribution system (RDN), high PV penetration imposes over-voltage and under-voltage issues during peaking PV production and peak loading conditions respectively. Taking these into consideration, this paper proposes a voltage regulation methodology based on active-reactive power management through PV inverters. A PQ-V control curve is formulated for the PV inverters and corresponding tuning parameters are introduced for rapid voltage regulation using real-time measurements. The control strategy is evaluated on two scenarios of RDN based on different R/X ratios and nodes distances to validate its robustness.