A Decentralized Wide-Area Voltage Control Scheme for Coordinated Secondary Voltage Regulation Using PMUs

This article proposes a novel decentralized purely data-driven Wide-Area Voltage Control (WAVC) scheme for improved coordinated secondary voltage regulation in power systems. To shape the decentralized control structure while accounting for the physical characteristics of the network, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data are leveraged to estimate the electrical distances, conduct the zoning-based partitioning of the network in voltage control zones and decide which buses to choose as the pilot bus locations. The developed PMU-based decentralized WAVC strategy is independent of any system model information, does not require offline training and is adaptive to the available PMU dataset. Dynamic simulations on the IEEE 39-Bus benchmark system verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach under the deployment of the voltage control in one zone as well as the coordination of the voltage control response in a multi-zone system. Due to its data-driven nature, the proposed method can adapt to varying network configurations and topology conditions by updating the voltage control zones and the decentralized control design when required.