A Unified Cooperative Distributed Control of Inverters, Voltage Regulators, and Capacitors in Systems with High Penetration of DGs

This paper presents a unified voltage control method in power distribution systems with high penetration of inverter-interfaced distributed generators (DGs), in particular, photo-voltaic (PV) units. The proposed method uses cooperative distributed control to optimally dispatch the reactive power from PV inverters while simultaneously controlling the number of tap operations for voltage regulators (VRs) and capacitor steps to maintain system voltages within a desired bandwidth. The proposed method is exemplified on the modified IEEE 123-Node Test Feeder with high penetration of PVs spread around the system in different phases, using real-time solar generation.