Feeder monitoring for volt/VAR control in distribution systems

This paper investigates the real-time monitoring on a distribution feeder needed for advanced volt/var control. The paper also proposes a meter placement method needed for this purpose. To determine minimum set of measurements needed to estimate the node voltages within the desired accuracy, a meter placement scheme has also been proposed. The proposed scheme has two stages. First stage uses a set of rules to place an initial set of current and voltage meters. In the second stage, a meter sorting procedure is used to identify the minimum set of meters that are needed. Test results on a prototype feeder are given to illustrate the performance of the method.