Using smart devices to provide distributed reactive power support

Smart devices are becoming more common. Many of them already possess the hardware and software capabilities to implement the reactive power injection control as discussed in this paper. In the near future, such devices would be dispersed over a large portion of the electric distribution network, thus making distributed reactive voltage support feasible. This paper presents network-level benefits of such a scheme using a PowerWorld simulation. Applications are discussed, a proposed control framework is simulated in Simulink for a single smart device and future work is outlined.