Pseudo-gradient based local voltage control in distribution networks

Voltage regulation is critical for distribution systems, and has become a much more challenging problem with the increasing proliferation of distributed renewable energy resources that cause frequent and rapid voltage fluctuations beyond what can be handled by the traditional voltage regulation methods. In this paper, motivated by the shortcomings of two previously proposed inverter-based local volt/var control algorithms, we design a pseudo-gradient based voltage control algorithm for the distribution network that does not constrain the allowable control functions while admits low implementation complexity. We characterize the convergence of the pseudo-gradient based control scheme, and compare it against the two previous algorithms in terms of the convergence condition and the convergence rate.