Prosumer-Driven Voltage Regulation via Coordinated Real and Reactive Power Control

As the penetration of roof-top solar photovoltaics (PV) becomes very large, voltage regulation to the power grid via transactive energy has emerged to achieve system security and flexibility. Several recent studies have extensively studied transactive mechanisms that directly control either real or reactive power of the prosumers. However, they fail to fully incentivize prosumers’ participation due to potential power losses (for real-power control) and prosumers’ low regulation capacities (for reactive-power control). This paper addresses this gap by exploiting the capacities of prosumers’ distributed assets through simultaneous control of both real and reactive powers. In particular, a transactive mechanism is proposed for PV prosumers connected to a remote-area distribution feeder to manage their PV inverters for voltage regulation. In this mechanism, customers are given economic benefits for providing voltage regulation services, which are integrated into their operational objectives. The formulated multi-agent structure is modeled as a non-cooperative Nash game, in which the non-differentiable nature of the problem is eliminated by a smooth approximation, and solved with a Nikaido-Isoda function-based descent direction algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme incurs lower costs for prosumers both individually and collectively, and significantly improves the feeder voltage profile.