Coordination of Networked Microgrids for Supporting Voltages of Bulk Power Systems

Active distribution system resources have the potential to support the bulk power system (BPS) during abnormal conditions, increasing reliability and resilience of power systems and end-use customers. This paper investigates for the first time the BPS voltage support provided by networked microgrids at the feeder level. A peer-to-peer (P2P) communication control framework is introduced to enable the coordination of multiple microgrids in a mixed ownership environment. This allows the microgrids to collectively implement a consensus algorithm (CA) to distributedly determine their own reactive power injections. Thus, their reactive power injection contributions are realized in a fair manner, having the same ratio of reactive power injection to reactive power headroom for all microgrids. The CA implementation and performance within the P2P communication framework are demonstrated on the IEEE 39-bus system with 10 microgrids contained in the distribution feeder assumed to be connected to one of the BPS buses.