Accelerated Dual Ascent-Based Coordinated Voltage Control for PV-Rich Distribution Network

With the increasing penetration of distributed photovoltaic (PV) in distribution network, time-varying PV generation may result in severe voltage problems. Utilizing the reactive power capacity of PV inverters to regulate voltage offers a viable solution to mitigate the limitations of traditional reactive power compensators. This paper proposes an online accelerated dual ascent method (ADAM) based voltage control strategy for a distribution network with rich PV. The voltage control problem is initially formulated as a convex quadratic optimization problem to maintain the permissible voltage profiles of the PV nodes with the operation constraint on voltage and reactive power output capacity. Then, the ADAM is proposed to solve the optimization problem in a distribution manner. The proposed method can achieve a fast convergence speed by adding the accelerated algorithm to the traditional dual ascent method (DAM). In the distributed algorithm, each agent only collects neighbor information without global communication, thus, the complexity of computation and communication can be alleviated effectively. Moreover, the control strategy leverages real-time voltage measurements to respond promptly to typical daily voltage variations—such as midday voltage rise and nighttime voltage drop. The efficiency and superiority of the proposed method are validated through simulations on the IEEE 123-bus test system with high penetration of PV and a representative rural distribution network in China.