Consensus-Based Approach for Active Power Control and Reserve Estimation in Distributed PV Systems

With the increased adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs) in power systems, DERs are expected to contribute to power system reliability services and enhance power system stability. This paper presents a distributed consensus control approach for the real-time active power reserve estimation and power management in distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems. The proposed method estimates the cumulative active power reserve from numerous PV generators using only the sparse communication network for a DER aggregator to provide active power regulation services. It also can be used by DER aggregators to manage curtailment in distributed PV systems to maintain stipulated reserves and to provide power system frequency regulation. Using the proposed approach, the DER aggregator requires only measurements at the feeder substation, and it does not require information from individual DER units, thereby improving system resilience. The proposed distributed consensus control method is validated on the IEEE 123-node test bed using PSCAD simulations.