A comparative study of centralized and decentralized active power control in residential energy districts

In this paper, a decentralized voltage control service for the distribution system operator (DSO) is proposed and a comparison with a centralized strategy, such as the conservation voltage control (CVR) technique is presented. The service is designed to provide short term power reserve to the grid and it implements a local voltage-led demand response. The proposed service manages residential units' power demand by regulating the household devices' main voltages in a local way instead of changing the secondary voltage of the medium voltage/low voltage (MV/LV) transformer. The proposed service allows having a wider voltage regulation range, overcoming the CVR limits due to voltage violations at the end of the feeders. In order to analyze the decentralized control impact in terms of maximum control range available on the LV distribution grid, a simulation set based on OpenDSS and MATLAB is carried out. The results are compared with those obtained by using the CVR technique in order to highlight the advantages provided by the proposed solution.