Distributed Optimal Reactive Power Control in Islanded Microgrids with Voltage-Source Inverters

Microgrids are foreseen to be an essential part of the future smart grid. Control of islanded microgrid systems to maintain stability and security is, therefore, a pressing problem. While local control can ensure that each resource within a microgrid shares active power equally, nonlocal methods are needed to share reactive power. This paper aims to develop centralized and distributed control laws to share power equitably among distributed generation resources in an islanded microgrid. While the centralized law shows good convergence to an optimal solution, the distributed law struggles to reach consensus among buses on the optimal solution and converges very slowly. Next, we demonstrate that optimized linear averaging consensus algorithms bridge the gap between the high-performance centralized methods and low communication distributed methods.