Evaluating conservation voltage reduction: An application of GridLAB-D: An open source software package

Conservation Voltage Reduction (CVR) is the reduction of energy consumption resulting from a reduction of the service voltage. While there have been numerous CVR deployments in North America, there has been little substantive analytic analysis of the effect; the majority of the published results are based on empirical field measurements. Due to the lack of analytic study, it is difficult to determine the impacts of CVR outside of sites that have conducted demonstration projects. This panel paper will examine a framework for the analysis of CVR using the open source software package GridLAB-D. An open source simulation environment is used to highlight the effectiveness of open source software programs and their ability to be used for evaluating multi-disciplinary smart grid technologies.