Award Date

May 2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Committee Member

Yahia Baghzouz

Second Committee Member

Emma E. Regentova

Third Committee Member

Sahjendra Singh

Fourth Committee Member

Robert F. Boehm

Number of Pages

101

Abstract

Global conditions over the past dozen years have led to an expanded appetite for renewable energy sources: The diminishing fossil fuel supply, the political instability of countries producing these fossil fuels, the ever-more destructive effects of global warming, and the lowering of costs for renewable energy technologies have made countries around the world reconsider their sources of energy. The proliferation of photovoltaic (PV) systems especially has surged dramatically with the decreasing initial costs for installation, and increasing government support in the form of renewable energy portfolios, feed-in-tariffs,

tax incentives, etc. Furthermore, electric vehicles (EV) are also becoming widespread due to recent advances in battery and electric drive technologies, and the desperate need to reduce air pollution in urban areas.

Meanwhile, electric utilities are always making an effort to run their system more efficiently by encouraging the use of energy-efficient appliances and customer participation in demand-side management programs. In an attempt to further reduce load demand; many utilities regulate the voltage along their distribution feeders in a particular way that is referred to as conservation voltage reduction (CVR). The key principle of CVR operation is that the ANSI standard voltage band between 114 and 126 volts can be compressed via regulation to the lower half (114–120) instead of the upper half (120–126), producing measurable energy savings at low cost and without harm to consumer appliances.

As the penetration of distributed PV and EV charging station increases, this can dramatically change the conventional demand profile as PV system act as negative loads during the daylight hours, and EVs significantly increase load demand during charging. Consequently, traditional means of controlling the voltage by capacitor switching and voltage regulators can be improved in this “smart” grid era by adding a fleet of enabling devices including the smart PV inverter functionalities, such as Volt/VAR control, and intelligent EV charging schemes.

This thesis explores how better energy conservation is achieved by CVR in a modern distribution system with advanced distributed PV systems inverters and EV loads. Then it summarizes computer simulations that are conducted on the IEEE 37 and IEEE 123 node test feeders using OpenDSS interfaced with MATLAB.

Disciplines

Electrical and Computer Engineering

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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