Improvement of conservation voltage reduction energy savings via local voltage regulation

Conservation voltage reduction (CVR) offers an inexpensive method to reduce the power consumption of distribution feeders with minimal capital investment. However, the ability to apply CVR on a feeder is limited by a small number of “bottleneck” loads, those with poor voltage regulation. Recent advances in power semiconductor devices are making distributed power and voltage control at the edges of the grid a reality. One example of this is a power electronic local voltage regulator (LVR), which provides a targeted solution to mitigate this problem of “bottlenecks.” The targeted nature of the devices means that with a small number of approximations the authors were able to develop a computationally efficient method to economically place the LVRs. This paper illustrates how the placement method is applied to quantify the economic savings gained by improving CVR through the deployment of LVRs. Deploying a small number of LVRs can yield significant savings versus conventional approaches, while also improving power quality to end user customers.