Reactive Power Allocation of PV Inverters for Voltage Support in Power Systems Based on Transactive Energy Approach

Reactive power support is a part of ancillary services that is becoming more important due to an increase of distributed energy resources (DERs) in today’s power systems. The intermittent nature of the DERs also increases the challenges of voltage management in power systems, and limitations of power system reinforcement are becoming a bottleneck to improving reliability of power systems. Thus, cooperation of existing equipment, including utility-owned and nonutility-owned assets, can be utilized to achieve higher reliability of the system. A transactive energy approach is proposed to coordinate the nonutility DERs to participate in reactive power support. Voltage sensitivity is used to determine the impact of DERs at different locations that will simultaneously participate in a reactive power market. The modified DERs’ supply curve is constructed to evaluate the impact of DERs’ locations based on the transactive energy approach. The performance of the proposed method is validated by comparing to other location-based and non-location-based reactive power dispatch methods. An implementation of the modified DER’s supply curve can successfully improve the voltage at the target location by an amount that is specified by the system.