A Game-Theoretic Approach for the Effective Distributed Coordination of STATCOMs

The increasing integration of utility-scale wind/photovoltaic farms in transmission networks is posing new technological challenges that must be faced to ensure grid stability. Voltage control is one of the issues that must be tackled. Making use of the available voltage controllers in the grid, it is possible to design sophisticated and robust coordination algorithms for a more efficient performance. The intention of this work is to show the feasibility of applying non-cooperative game-theory to distributed voltage compensator controls in AC transmission networks, in which no evident efforts can be found in the related literature. In contrast to previous works, we define sets of STATCOMs that participate in the game without any centralized entity. The identification of sets is based on sensitivity coefficients, which model the impact that the variation of the setpoint on an element has on other nodes. With the use of sets, the approach is more robust and scalable. Another relevant advantage of the proposal is the use of minimum and non-sensitive data exchange, with which the local controllers reach the optimal solution with an iterative procedure in a fast way. The effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated for the IEEE 14-bus test system with three STATCOM units. Each STATCOM may be associated to a PV or a wind large-scale farm. The simulation output reveals that the proposed algorithm is close to the solution provided by a centralised control. When compared with consensus-based algorithms, our proposal converges faster and thus it proves the feasibility.