Smart Grid Demonstration: Distributed Active and Reactive Power Control

The present infrastructure of energy delivery was designed over 60 years ago with the goal to be centralized. However, it is aging and is under-utilized, which will potentially limit the world\u27s ability to achieve its energy objective. The lack of vibrant control on the grid makes it difficult to stop cascading power failure, and to achieve high penetration of renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar thus resulting in grid instability. A decentralized and distributed control mechanism implemented with a definite communication protocol solves the issues mentioned above. The electric power grid going into the future is expected to consists of distributed generators and loads. The implementation of a distributed control will benefit utility services and will create financial advantages. One of the best solutions is to organize these distributed generators (DG) in a micro-grid structure which will then connect to the main grid through the point of common coupling (PCC). A proper organization and control of the Microgrid is always a big challenge. To overcome this, using cooperative control makes it possible to bring together different agents in the networked systems as a group and realize the desired objective. The micro grid power objective is set by a virtual leader and is transferred to the other agents in the system through a local communication channel. A distributed cooperative control is formulated to effectively organize all the DGs in the Microgrid to produce the necessary active and reactive power to satisfy multiple objectives. It not only satisfies the active power flow from the main grid to a constant but also reduces the reactive power flow to the main grid. Moreover, the algorithm can be used to implement the demand response continuously using a combination of DGs and their local controllable loads. The approach is to use distributed inverters with the aid of multiple local communication channels for active power compensation of the micro-grid in real-time in a distributed and cooperative manner