Determining the optimal setting of voltage regulators for day-ahead management of distribution smart systems

Environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as oil depletion are prime motivators for the development and adoption of renewable power sources. However, the traditional operating philosophy of power systems and the random nature of these sources represent an important barrier for their massive deployment. Fluctuations of wind and solar power generation integrated as distributed sources can induce important variations on the voltage profile, leading to values out of the range typically suggested by power quality standards. To deal with this problem, in this paper the optimal setting of voltage regulators (VRs) at each hour has been optimally determined by implementing a genetic algorithm with integer codification, so that it can be effectively integrated with the load flow methodologies currently available in the literature without requiring any linearization process. Results obtained from the analysis of a case study reveal the behavior of the optimal VR settings and reactive power compensation on a daily basis, which are highly correlated with the daily load profile.