Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Hoke, Anderson F..
This is the final report for a project to support the development of systems integration standards. The scope of work undertaken by the multi-laboratory team was to facilitate standards development and to help expedite the process in three important standards identified under the SunShot National Laboratory Multiyear Partnership (SuNLaMP) grid performance and reliability topic area.
This report describes work performed by the Hawaiian Electric Companies and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to model and simulate advanced inverter grid-support functions and to validate and expand on those simulations through a field pilot study. This work builds on earlier research, referred to as the Voltage Regulation Operational Strategies study. The objective of both is to investigate functionalities available in most photovoltaic (PV) inverters to modulate active and reactive power autonomously based on local voltage measurements for the purpose of mitigating off-nominal grid voltage conditions. Specifically of interest are volt/volt-ampere reactive (VAR) control and volt/watt control, the effect of those functions on quasi-steady-state feeder voltages, and the impact of the functions on PV energy production. Because volt/VAR and volt/watt control autonomously adjust inverter output based on local conditions without requiring communication with any other devices, they are good candidates to increase PV hosting capacity when it is limited by voltage constraints in a feeder with very large numbers of PV systems.