Enhancing Conservation Voltage Reduction using Coordinated Control of Medium and Low Voltage Controllable Devices

A large amount of distributed energy resources (DERs) are integrated into distribution system. As the operating cycle of DERs are faster, legacy devices are not sufficient in mitigating the voltage issues occurred due to DERs in a distribution system. Hence, fast operating voltage controllable devices are integrated in both the medium and low voltage side of a distribution network. This motivates a coordinated control of all the voltage controllable device to achieve a desired objective. In this paper, a distribution optimal power flow (D-OPF) problem is proposed, which combines legacy devices and new medium voltage controllable devices for conservation voltage reduction (CVR). Next, the low voltage controllable device maintains the nodal voltage set-point obtained from D-OPF. The coordinated control of all the voltage controllable devices increase the energy savings in a network. The scalability of the proposed D-OPF is demonstrated using an actual utility feeder. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed coordinated control for enhancing the energy savings.