Smart grid adds to renewable resources hosting capacity: Collaboration of plug‐in hybrid electric vehicles in Volt/VAr control process

Summary This paper develops an efficient energy management approach to increase the renewables share in energy provision of smart distribution grids (SDGs). Voltage violation ends in curtailment of renewables generations and, hence, decreases the economic success of distribution companies. To avert such deficits, this study fosters the collaboration of SDG components in an intelligent Volt/VAr control process. The investigated SDG is characterized with high penetration of photovoltaics (PVs), dispatchable distributed generations (DDGs), plug‐in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and infield control devices say as under‐load tap‐changing transformers (ULTCs). In charge stations, PHEVs are coupled to the SDG through bidirectional inverters which are offering simultaneous exchanges of active and reactive powers. Thus, regarding the PHEV aggregators, optimal schedules of active power charge/discharge signals with their inductive/capacitive reactive power provisions are determined. This notion effectively increases PV power injections and, consequently, provides significant monetary savings. Besides, this mechanism reduces ULTC tap operations in Volt/VAr control process maintaining its nominal lifetime. The proposed approach is formulated as a mixed‐integer non‐linear programming (MINLP) and solved based on DICOPT solvers in general algebraic modeling system (GAMS). Effectiveness of the proposed approach is explored on a typical distribution test system. The obtained results show 8.94% increment in harvested PVs power and hence 5.24% reduction on daily operation cost of SDG. Key findings: Establishing a well‐defined DMS strategy for smart distribution grids; Increasing hosting capacity of renewable resources in distribution networks; Incorporating active and reactive power contributions of PHEVs in Volt/VAr control processes; Moderating daily variations of ULTCs and increasing their operational lifetimes; Enhancing economical metrics of SDGs by providing higher support of renewable resources.