Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Open Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Sumit Paudyal

Advisor 2

Mohsen Azizi

Committee Member 1

Wayne W. Weaver

Abstract

With the increasing trend of utilizing renewable energy generators such as photovoltaic (PV) cells and wind turbines, power systems are transforming from a centralized power grid structure to a cluster of smart micro-grids with more autonomous power sharing capabilities. Even though the decentralized control of power systems is a reliable and cost effective solution, due to the inherent heterogeneous nature of micro-grids, optimal and efficient power sharing among distributed generators (DG’s) is a major issue which calls for advanced control techniques for voltage stabilization of the entire micro-grid cluster. The proposed consensus based algorithm in this thesis is a solution to overcome these control challenges, which only requires each DG to exchange information with its directly connected neighboring DG’s, in order to maintain the power balance and voltage stability of the entire micro-grid cluster. The proposed method in this thesis is simulated in PSCAD and its effectiveness is demonstrated using several realistic and practical cases including micro-grid topology changes, communication delays, and load changes.

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