Decentralized Voltage Control to Minimize Distribution Losses in an Islanded Microgrid

Microgrids can bring electricity power to rural communities or isolated military forward operation bases. For many rural areas, renewable powers could be the cheapest power sources available. Utilizing renewable power sources and energy storage systems such as batteries requires new power and voltage control strategies. In addition, these microgrids may be reconfigured frequently. Therefore, the control strategies must be implemented in a plug-and-play fashion at individual nodes, and ideally they should not require much communication with neighboring nodes. Another issue of microgrids is the resistance loss in distribution lines due to the lower operating voltage. To reduce power losses, voltage control is required which again must work in a plug-and-play fashion. In this paper, we propose a decentralized real-time voltage control algorithm that minimizes power losses for a microgrid supported by inverter based distributed power sources. Its optimality and plug-and-play nature are demonstrated through simulations.