Design of decentralized voltage control for PV inverters to mitigate voltage rise in distribution power system without communication

High penetration of PV generation may result in serious voltage rise in the distribution power system due to reverse power flow. This paper presents a decentralized voltage control for PV inverters to mitigate voltage fluctuations. Instead of operating in MPPT (maximum power point tracking) mode, each PV inverter is able to adjust its real power and reactive power based on resistive and inductive characteristics at its installation location, respectively. In this way, dispersed PV inverters on the feeder are able to cooperatively reduce voltage rise based on individual installation voltage only. Therefore, more PV inverters are allowed to deliver their power to the utility without violating voltage regulation. In this paper, various case studies were conducted to verify effectiveness of the proposed method by using power-flow analysis and time-domain simulation.