Cooperative Framework For Mitigation of Voltage Limit Violations in a Rural Distribution System with Electric Vehicles Fleet

Rural feeder models have long been prone to poor quality of electricity supply, especially in remote areas due to unbalanced loads and extra long feeders. Recent approaches propose solutions using distributed energy resource like solar Photovoltaic (PV) rooftops, however, the actual problem still persists due to uncertainty and intermittency inherent with these PV resources. This paper proposes a cooperative framework for an electric vehicle fleet to address these voltage issues in a low-voltage distribution system with high penetration of solar PV rooftops and uncertain loading. Electric fleet batteries are managed and monitored through cooperative agents that have contractual agreements with owners to utilize vehicle batteries for ancillary services and provide incentives in the form of specialized rate structures at their charging stations. Charging stations are operated by the same agents, which may own multiple stations across the distribution territory. Our proposed framework makes use of local bus voltages to detect issues and dispatch power from these charging stations, considering all the fleet batteries as collective energy storage capacity available. A real rural field model is utilized for testing practical scenarios and also field data sets are considered to showcase the voltage profile improvement as result. Three-lateral feeder based analysis is also projected in the paper.