Smart Meters Enabling Voltage Monitoring and Control: The Last-Mile Voltage Stability Issue

This article investigates the voltage monitoring and control feature for smart meters and identifies the impact of this feature on both power distribution and communication systems. Regarding the voltage monitoring, a cosimulation platform is developed using GridLAB-D and ns-3 to analyze the impact of adding voltage measurements to smart meter readings and assess the mitigation strategies for reducing timeout errors and packet drops of smart meter data. Regarding the voltage control, a new voltage stability control scheme is developed, which applies the voltage stability margin as the control objective, instead of the traditional voltage magnitude. The proposed control scheme makes use of existing advanced metering infrastructure and distributed energy resources (DERs), requiring small marginal costs. It is indicated that integrating the voltage monitoring and control feature, smart meters could enable the voltage stability issues being solved at end-user sides, i.e., the “last-mile” segment. It is also implied that the new feature could support the coordination of the local and system-level voltage controls using both customer-owned and utility-scale DERs.