Qiuling Yang

Qiuling Yang, Gang Wang, Alireza Sadeghi et al.

Modern distribution grids are currently being challenged by frequent and sizable voltage fluctuations, due mainly to the increasing deployment of electric vehicles and renewable generators. Existing approaches to maintaining bus voltage magnitudes within the desired region can cope with either traditional utility-owned devices (e.g., shunt capacitors), or contemporary smart inverters that come with distributed generation units (e.g., photovoltaic plants). The discrete on-off commitment of capacitor units is often configured on an hourly or daily basis, yet smart inverters can be controlled within milliseconds, thus challenging joint control of these two types of assets. In this context, a novel two-timescale voltage regulation scheme is developed for distribution grids by judiciously coupling data-driven with physicsbased optimization. On a faster timescale, say every second, the optimal setpoints of smart inverters are obtained by minimizing instantaneous bus voltage deviations from their nominal values, based on either the exact alternating current power flow model or a linear approximant of it; whereas, on the slower timescale (e.g., every hour), shunt capacitors are configured to minimize the longterm discounted voltage deviations using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Extensive numerical tests on a real-world 47- bus distribution network as well as the IEEE 123-bus test feeder using real data corroborate the effectiveness of the novel scheme.

Qiuling Yang, Alireza Sadeghi, Gang Wang et al.

Pronounced variability due to the growth of renewable energy sources, flexible loads, and distributed generation is challenging residential distribution systems. This context, motivates well fast, efficient, and robust reactive power control. Real-time optimal reactive power control is possible in theory by solving a non-convex optimization problem based on the exact model of distribution flow. However, lack of high-precision instrumentation and reliable communications, as well as the heavy computational burden of non-convex optimization solvers render computing and implementing the optimal control challenging in practice. Taking a statistical learning viewpoint, the input-output relationship between each grid state and the corresponding optimal reactive power control is parameterized in the present work by a deep neural network, whose unknown weights are learned offline by minimizing the power loss over a number of historical and simulated training pairs. In the inference phase, one just feeds the real-time state vector into the learned neural network to obtain the `optimal' reactive power control with only several matrix-vector multiplications. The merits of this novel statistical learning approach are computational efficiency as well as robustness to random input perturbations. Numerical tests on a 47-bus distribution network using real data corroborate these practical merits.