Adaptive coordination of sequential droop control for PV inverters to mitigate voltage rise in PV-Rich LV distribution networks

This paper introduces an adaptive sequential droop control strategy for PV inverters to mitigate voltage rise problems in PV-rich LV distribution networks. To facilitate the effective coordination of sequential (Q-V and P-V) droop control of PV inverters, multiple control areas with the strong coupling nature of PV systems are identified based on the epsilon-decomposition technique. The droop control parameters are tuned and adapted, based on a consensus among PV inverters within each control area. This proposed control strategy inherits the autonomous feature of the droop control for coping with voltage rise issues while being able to avoid curtailing a significant amount of PV production. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, simulations using MATLAB/Simulink are performed on a real European LV distribution network, considering a PV penetration level of about 150%. The obtained results highlight that the proposed control strategy successfully mitigates voltage rise problems while significantly reducing the amount of curtailed PV generation by approximately 35.6% and 76.2% when compared with the static sequential droop control and the static Q-V droop control and adaptive P-V droop control, respectively. Simultaneously, the effective contribution among all the PV systems towards voltage rise mitigation is obtained.