DER Information Unaware Coordination via Day-ahead Dynamic Power Bounds

Reliability and voltage quality in distribution networks have been achieved via a combination of transformer power rating satisfaction and voltage management asset control. To maintain reliable operation under this paradigm, however, future grids with deep DER penetrations would require costly equipment upgrades. These upgrades can be mitigated via judicious coordination of DER operation. Earlier work has assumed a hierarchical control architecture in which a global controller (GC) uses detailed power injection and DER data and knowledge of DER owners' objectives to determine setpoints that local controllers should follow in order to achieve reliable and cost effective grid operation. Having such detailed data and assuming knowledge of DER owners' objectives, however, are often not desirable or possible. In an earlier work, a 2- layer DER coordination architecture was shown to achieve close to optimal performance despite infrequent (e.g., once per day) communication to a global controller. Motivated by this work, this paper proposes a day-ahead coordination scheme that uses forecasted power profile ranges to generate day-ahead dynamic power rating bounds at each transformer. Novel features of this scheme include: (i) the GC knows only past node power injection data and does not impose or know DER owner objectives, (ii) we use bounds that ensure reliable operation to guide the local controllers rather than setpoint tracking, and (iii) we consider electric vehicle (EV) charging in addition to storage. Simulations using the IEEE 123-bus network show that with random placements of 50% solar, 50% EVs and only 10% storage penetrations, the uncoordinated approach incurs rating violations at nearly all 86 transformers and results in 10 times higher voltage deviation, while our approach incurs only 12 rating violations and maintains almost the same voltage deviations as before the addition of solar and EVs.