Power-Sensitivities-Based Indirect Voltage Control of Renewable Energy Generators with Power Constraints

Recently, renewable energy has received considerable attention worldwide due to environmental problems such as climate change. However, there are still many problems to be solved to increase the penetration level of renewable energy sources in a power system. Above all, a power system with a high renewable penetration level requires an entirely novel operational strategy and control approach to achieve reliable operation by considering the intermittency of variable renewable energy sources. This paper proposes power-sensitivities-based indirect voltage control of renewable energy generators with power constraints. The proposed method realizes seamless control of the voltage by compensating with the reactive power if the real power of the distributed generator (DG) is insufficient due to its intermittency. To achieve the proposed method, the real and reactive power references of DGs are initially operated based on the power sensitivities between generation and loads if all the DGs operate within the power constraints. However, if at least one of the DGs reaches its constraint limit, the references can be modified using other sensitivities between real and reactive power generation enabling indirect voltage control of DGs. Therefore, a high level of renewable penetration in power systems can be accomplished with the proposed method. The proposed method is verified with several case studies that are based on a microgrid with practical data from a real island power system. Verification is carried out using the power system computer aided design and electromagnetic transient including DC (PSCAD/EMTDC™) simulation software.