Volt-VAR Control Through Joint Optimization of Capacitor Bank Switching, Renewable Energy, and Home Appliances

Today, the evolution of smart grid, electric vehicles (EVs) with voltage to the grid mode, and deployment of renewable energy sources (RESs) are bringing revolutionary changes to the existing electrical grid. Volt-VAR optimization (VVO) is a well-studied problem, for bringing solutions to reduce the losses and demand along the distribution lines. The current VVO, however, does not acknowledge the role of elastic and inelastic loads, EVs, and RESs to reduce the reactive power losses and hence the cost of generation. We propose a mathematical model Volt-VAR and CVR optimization (VVCO)/optimal energy consumption model (OECM) to solve the VVO problem by considering load shifting, EV as the storage and carrier of the energy, and use of RES. The VVCO/OECM not only reduces the reactive load but also flatten the load curve to reduce the uncertainty in the generation and to decrease the cost. The system also considers the efficiency of the electrical equipment to enhance the lifetime of the devices. We develop a non-cooperative game to solve the VVCO/OECM problem. To evaluate the performance, we simulate the VVCO/OECM model and compare with the existing VVO solution. We found that our method took almost a constant time to produce a solution of VVO regardless of the size of the network. The proposed method also outperform the existing VVO solution by reducing the generation cost and flatten the load and minimizes the uncertainty in the power generation. Results have shown that exploiting RES will reduce the voltage drop through reducing the injection of reactive power to the system.