Voltage Control

The voltage control algorithms developed in the project consisted of several solutions to maintain the voltage within the limits in distribution grid. Throughout the project, online and Model Predictive Centralized (MPC) voltage control algorithm has been developed and tested in both centralised and distributed implementation. The online control represents a voltage control algorithm that solves sudden voltage violations using the last received measurements from the field. This approach has been initially presented in a centralized formulation and then re-proposed in a distributed fashion for the implementation in the field trial. The distributed implementation of the online voltage control has been achieved using software containers, which also integrated the peer-to-peer communication among the control nodes. With this approach a fully distributed online voltage control implementation with actual communication has been tested.

The MPC voltage control represents a control algorithm that solves voltage problems also considering a future time horizon, using forecast profiles. With this approach the voltage control algorithm can predict the control set-points to solve future possible voltage violations and can formulate the flexibility requests. This algorithm has been used in its centralized form in the SWW field trial to calculate flexibility requests for the interface to the flexibility trading platform. Additional research has been carried out to develop a distributed implementation of the MPC for voltage control. The results of this research, presented in a journal article, have shown the need for further investigations before considering an implementation in the field. For this reason, the distributed formulation of the MPC has not been further implemented in the field.

The implementation and development of the voltage control algorithms will be carried out during the project BeFlexible, which started on September 2022. In particular, the algorithms will be further developed in a field trial in the city of Rome as part of the RWTH planned exploitation and further development of the edgeFLEX results