Tuning of Voltage Regulator Control in Distribution Systems with High Renewable Penetration

Fast growing penetration of renewable generation based distributed energy resources (DERs) brings many challenges to the operation of distribution systems. One such a challenge that has been widely recognized is voltage regulation under high renewable intermittency. This paper first summarizes a list of various solutions proposed by many publications, and later focuses on resolving the issue using the existing control of voltage regulators (VR). A modified IEEE 34 bus system is modeled and simulated in CYMDIST (R) to reveal the said voltage regulation problem. The impact of varying a few selected control parameters to the operation result are evaluated. In order to help the readers to gain a quantitative insight to the impact, a few performance metrics are introduced in the evaluation. With the help of these metrics, one will know how much he can tune the VR control to avoid excessive switching.