An Advanced Voltage Regulation Strategy for the Meshed Distribution Networks with Soft Normally-Open Point

The high penetration of the renewable energy resources (RESs), especially the large-scale photovoltaic (PV) integration, will result in voltage fluctuation and overvoltage issues in the radial type distribution grids. Hence, the soft normally open point (SNOP) is generally adopted to create the paths for active power exchange between different feeders. Moreover, unlike the traditional reactive-power-based voltage regulation schemes, an advanced control strategy is proposed in this paper by adjusting both active and reactive power to expand the feeder's voltage regulation range. Additionally, the converter capacities of the SNOP do not need to be increased by using this strategy, which is more competitive for distributed generation (DG) integration and consumption than the conventional control schemes. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed scheme are evaluated through MATLAB/Simulink simulation results.