Smart Inverter Impacts on California Distribution Feeders with Increasing PV Penetration: A Case Study
This work provides practical insights for utilities and regulators on the operational impacts of smart inverters in real distribution systems, though it is incremental as it applies known control strategies to a specific case study.
The study simulates smart inverter deployments on a real California distribution feeder under increasing PV penetration, finding improvements in voltage regulation and tap operations but increased line losses at high penetration levels.
The impacts of high PV penetration on distribution feeders have been well documented within the last decade. To mitigate these impacts, interconnection standards have been amended to allow PV inverters to regulate voltage locally. However, there is a deficiency of literature discussing how these inverters will behave on real feeders under increasing PV penetration. In this paper, we simulate several deployment scenarios of these inverters on a real California distribution feeder. We show that minimum and maximum voltage, tap operations, and voltage variability are improved due to the inverters. Line losses were shown to increase at high PV penetrations as a side effect. Furthermore, we find inverter sizing was shown to be important as PV penetration increased. Finally we show that increasing the number of inverters and removing the deadband from the Volt/VAr control curve improves the effectiveness.