The Department of Electrical Engineering at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE) held a talk, ‘Voltage Control and Photovoltaic Hosting Capacity in Distribution Networks’ on December 11, 2019. Dr. Ammar Arshad from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, Finland presented the talk.
Increasing renewable power resources in the distribution networks are having adverse effect on the voltage quality due to their intermittent nature. Classical centralised voltage control strategies are bound to become complex and computationally time-consuming with the increasing number of distributed energy resources in the network. With the development of smart grid technologies, such as agents, the focus is shifting towards the distributed control strategies. Agents are the intelligent entities that are able to devise control strategies based on the readily available data from the network. Therefore, multi-agent system based control strategies are being developed that can take control action with minimum latency. Moreover, distribution network operators have to identify and mitigate the problems arising with the renewable-integration in the networks and try to maximise the penetration level while maintaining the network constraints within the standards.
Dr. Arshad received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Later, he moved to Finland and completed the MSc and DSc degrees in Electrical Engineering And Automation from Aalto University (formerly Helsinki University of Technology), in 2016 and 2019, respectively. His main research interests are PV integration in distribution networks, distributed voltage control utilising smart grid technologies and the enhancement of PV hosting of the distribution networks.
