Voltage Support Based Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Scheme with Reactive Power Compensation

Peer-to-peer energy trading offers an opportunity to owners of distributed energy resources to sell their excess electricity to local peers for a better price than the tariffs offered by distribution system operators. However, the increased levels of power injection can lead to network voltage levels rising, at which point trading needs to be restricted to maintain the statutory voltage limits. This reduces potential benefits of trading schemes. In this paper, a proposed new peer-to-peer trading scheme is presented with reactive power compensation to regulate network voltage levels - thus allowing a greater volume of electricity to be traded without violating the voltage limits. Two methods of compensating reactive power for voltage level support were investigated: D-STATCOM and Photovoltaic (PV) system smart inverters. Trading schemes were developed for each of the methods. These schemes were then tested in a 24hour case study using the IEEE European Low Voltage Test Feeder. It was found that, when compared to a trading scheme without voltage support, the use of reactive power compensation led to a 2.89% increase in electricity traded for the DSTATCOM based scheme and a 2.94% increase for the smart inverter-based scheme. The inclusion of reactive power also led to an increase in income for users of the scheme by 1.32% and 1.76% respectively. Additionally, the smart inverter-based scheme used 281% less reactive power and had 5.71% lower power losses than the D-STATCOM based scheme.