Price-Based Demand Response Supported Three-Stage Hierarchically Coordinated Voltage Control for Microgrids

Photovoltaic inverters, as a promising voltage/var control (VVC) resource, can supply flexible reactive power to reduce microgrid power loss and regulate bus voltage. Meanwhile, active power plays a significant role in microgrid voltage profile. Price-based demand response (PBDR) can shift load demand via determining time-varying prices, which can be regarded as an effective means for active power shifting. However, due to the different characteristics, PBDR and inverter-based VVC lack systematic coordination. Thus, this paper proposes a PBDR-supported three-stage hierarchically coordinated voltage control method, including day-ahead PBDR scheduling, hourly-ahead inverter reactive power dispatch and real-time inverter local droop control. Considering their mutual influence, a stochastic optimization method is utilized to centrally or hierarchically coordinate adjacent two stages. To solve the bilinear constraints of droop control function, the problem is reformulated into a second-order cone programming relaxation model. Then, the concave constraints are convexified, forming a penalty convex-concave model for feasible solution recovery. Lastly, a convex-concave procedure-based solution algorithm is proposed to iteratively solve the penalty model. The proposed method is tested on 33-bus and 123-bus distribution networks and compared with other methods. The results verify the high efficiency of the proposed voltage control method to achieve power loss reduction and voltage regulation.