Distributed Economic Power Dispatch and Bus Voltage Control for Droop-Controlled DC Microgrids

This paper proposes a distributed economic power dispatch (EPD) and bus voltage control solution for droop-controlled DC microgrids. For the proposed solution, a local power controller and a local voltage controller are added for each distributed generator (DG) to overcome the limitations of the conventional droop control. The power controller generates the first voltage correction term by comparing the local output power of DG with the reference instruction generated by the proposed distributed EPD algorithm, and thus, it can reduce the operation cost of the microgrid by optimally sharing the load demand among all the participating DGs. The voltage controller generates the second voltage correction term by comparing the nominal DC bus voltage value with the average bus voltage generated by the proposed distributed average bus voltage observation (ABVO) algorithm, and thus, it can realize the global bus voltage regulation of the DC microgrid. In contrast with conventional solutions, the control solution can distribute the computational and communication burdens among all the DGs working in parallel, which is more flexible, scalable, and robust against single-point failure. The effectiveness of the proposed control solution is demonstrated through simulation studies.