Consensus-Based Distributed Control for Overvoltage Mitigation in LV Microgrids

In this paper, a consensus-based distributed control is proposed to mitigate overvoltage at the point of connection of PV systems in a low-voltage microgrid. The proposed control scheme uses a hierarchical control comprising the local control at each of PV inverters acting as the lower level control and the consensus-based distributed control acting as the higher level control. To cope with overvoltage problems due to the increasing PV penetration, the lower level control includes both the Q-V and PV droop functions. By using a consensus-based algorithm on sparse communication infrastructure, the higher level control layer is activated to allocate control resources optimally among PV inverters, i.e. active power curtailment of PV inverters being equal and as minimum as possible. The feasibility of the proposed control scheme is successfully verified through simulations on a French distribution network using MATLAB/Simulink.