Extremum Seeking Control of Distributed Energy Resources with Decaying Dither and Equilibrium-based Switching

Abstract

Optimal control of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) may be a critical component for proper operation of the electric distribution grid in the near future. However, many optimization-based approaches for managing DER require knowledge of the underlying distribution system topology, network impedances, and access to feeder-wide real time load information. In order to ameliorate these requirements, we propose a 2-dimensional Extremum Seeking (2D-ES) control scheme to manage DER active and reactive power contributions. We augment the 2D-ES scheme with an exponentially decaying probing (dither) signal that activates based on an equilibrium-based switching criteria. Our simulation results show that the approach can enable substation real and reactive power target tracking with dither signals that exponentially decay once the individual ES controllers have each reached their optimum values.