Application of PandaPower Tool in Evaluating the Potential of Using PV Distributed Generation for Voltage Regulation in Electrical Power Networks

Traditional electrical power systems were designed with an assumption of unidirectional power flows through electrical networks. For many years power plants had been the only sources of electrical energy, and the energy had been delivered to the consumers by the means of transmission and distribution networks exclusively.With the emergence of distributed generation units, power flows have become bidirectional, which has made it impossible to estimate the voltages and currents in substation feeder nodes by measuring only the values at the beginning of the feeder. As the aforementioned estimation process is the basis of traditional voltage regulation techniques, it is obvious that under the new circumstances existing methods have to be upgraded.The article demonstrates how the open source tool PandaPower along with the Python programming language was utilized to analyze and evaluate several different scenarios of using photovoltaic distributed sources inverters for voltage regulation in low voltage electrical power networks.