Optimal oversizing of utility-owned renewable DG inverter for voltage rise prevention in MV distribution systems

The penetration of renewable distributed generations (DG) is recently being increased in distribution systems. Due to the intermittent nature of these generation units, several technical problems are expected based on the environmental conditions and load profiles, such as voltage rise and increasing losses. A traditional way to alleviate these technical problems is to oversize their interfacing inverters for releasing their capacities to inject/absorb further reactive power. In the literature, the DG inverter is normally oversized by a certain percentage (e.g., 10%) for this purpose. In turn, an optimization-based method is proposed in this paper to calculate the optimal oversize of the interfaced inverter employed in various utility-owned DG types to regulate voltages and to reduce losses with minimum total costs. The proposed method considers the active power curtailment (APC) feature in the DG inverter and the transformer taps. Different control schemes of the interfaced inverter are considered and incorporated in the proposed optimization model. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with existing methods.