A Decentralized Transactive-Based Model for Reactive Power Ancillary Service Provision by Local Energy Communities

Local Energy Communities (LECs) have been introduced to facilitate the high penetration of distributed energy resources into distribution systems (DSs), which can also be valuable sources of ancillary services for Distribution System Operators (DSOs). The aim of this paper is to investigate if and how LECs can contribute to the reactive power management of DSs. To this end, a transactive-based model is proposed to manage the reactive power of LECs in a decentralized way. In the proposed model, DSO sends transactive signals to LECs and incentivizes them to inject/absorb reactive power aiming at controlling the voltage profile of DS. Accordingly, the reactive power management and thus voltage control is performed without any direct interferences of the DSO in the resource scheduling of LECs. The proposed model is applied to the DS of Chalmers campus to demonstrate its performance in reactive power management and voltage control.