Tertiary Control of Voltage Unbalance Compensation for Optimal Power Quality in Islanded Microgrids

In multi-bus islanded microgrids, the power quality requirements for different areas and buses can be different. This paper proposes a hierarchical control to realize optimal unbalance compensation for satisfying the power quality requirements in different areas. Primary and secondary controllers are applied to realize unbalance compensation for critical bus (CB) and at the same time, to make distributed generators (DGs) equally share the compensation efforts. Tertiary control, which inherently is an optimization method, is implemented to adjust the compensating effort of each DG considering the voltage unbalance limits in local buses and DG terminals. This method realizes multi-power-quality-level control in a multi-bus islanded system by optimally utilizing DGs as distributed compensators and saves the investment for additional compensation equipment. Hardware-in-the-loop results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method