IEEE Central Indiana Joint PES/PELS/IAS Chapter and Columbus PES Chapter welcome you to join this technical seminar/webinar provided by Dr. Xuan Wu and Adedoyin Inaolaji, both from AES Indiana. This will be a hybrid meeting and local attendees will be welcome to join in person at AES Indiana’s Morris Street Office in Indianapolis (there will be free pizzas and beverage). 1 PDH will be provided to attendees who attend the entire seminar.

Abstract: We will review common DER (distributed energy resources) interconnection recommendations and challenges from a utility perspective, and envision future improvemnets of better leveraging smart inverters for distribution system operations. One of the R&D efforts focused on optimal droop control of smart inverters will be discussed in detail. Voltage optimization and control becomes imperative with increased use of DERs in distribution feeders. Smart inverters (SIs) can be used effectively for voltage control and optimization especially for fast varying voltage fluctuation caused by high photovoltaic penetration. However, SIs are required to operate based on droops as per the IEEE-1547. Moreover, instead of following rule-based methods or arbitrarily selected settings, the SI settings should be optimally configured in order to enhance the network performance. The objective of this presentation is to discuss techniques to obtain optimal droop settings of SIs for Volt-Var grid-support functions.