PNNL

Abstract

Active distribution grids can experience voltage fluctuations and violations due to the high penetration of variable distributed energy resources (DERs). These problems might occur because of the uncertain and variable generation natures of these resources, especially solar photovoltaic resources, during panel shadowing scenarios. Volt-VAR control (VVC) is an efficient method that controls the reactive power set-points of the inverters to regulate the voltage of distribution grids. Although several VVC approaches have been proposed recently, the performance of these approaches degrades significantly if behind-the- meter solar generation data are unobservable/missing. Therefore, it is necessary to impute missing/unobservable PV data accurately to be utilized in VVC approaches. This paper pro- poses a model-free, data-driven, centrally trained, and decentrally executed multi-agent deep reinforcement learning-based VVC architecture to regulate the voltage of distribution net- works. A generative adversarial network (GAN) is incorporated to impute the unobservable PV data accurately, which improves the performance of the proposed control architecture. The proposed multi-agent-soft-actor-critic algorithm (MASAC)-based VVC technique utilizes the actual PV dataset as well as the imputed dataset from the GAN framework to learn the optimal coordinated control policy for controlling the optimal reactive power set- points of PV inverters. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is analyzed on a modified IEEE 34-bus test case with added PV inverters. The results are compared and analyzed with a base case model with no VVC and VVC with a local droop control approach, genetic algorithm optimization, and a centralized soft actor-critic-based approach. Moreover, the performance of the proposed approach is compared with that of a multi-agent VVC framework without using the PV generation data and load information as the system state. The results illustrate that the proposed method with more state input improves the voltage profile and reduces the power loss of the network across various loading and PV generation scenarios.