Weather-Driven PV-BESS Voltage Control for Radial Distribution Feeders

Abstract

The integration of photovoltaic (PV) systems in distribution feeders creates voltage-control challenges because PV generation changes with irradiance, temperature, and wind speed. This paper presents the Feeder-Aware Coordinated Voltage Control (FACVC) method for radial PV-BESS distribution feeders. Weather-driven denotes the traceable conversion of meteorological inputs into PV power followed by feeder-voltage evaluation, rather than a new electrical-device category. The test environment is a Python workflow using our PV power conversion program and pandapower AC power flow for the verified IEEE 33-bus operating cases; reduced custom and benchmark-inspired feeders are retained for screening controller behavior. FACVC uses load condition, available PV generation, feeder sensitivity coefficients, battery state of charge, and inverter reactive-power limits to coordinate battery charging/discharging and reactive-power support. It is compared with No Control, Rule-Based Control, Random Control, an SOC-constrained Volt-VAR-BESS droop comparator, and an implementation-specific PPO-RL benchmark. In the verified IEEE 33-bus results, FACVC reduced the average voltage-violation count from 171.67 under No Control to 79.67, a 53.6% reduction, and increased average voltage from 0.9468 pu to 0.9630 pu. This work also includes FACVC component analysis, multi-placement IEEE 33-bus validation, a CIGRE MV pandapower benchmark, surrogate-versus-AC error quantification, descriptive and paired inferential statistical analysis, and a proxy economic comparison. The simulation results show that FACVC improves voltage security through coordinated active and reactive support, although control-support costs can increase on feeders that are already within allowable ranges. The study therefore presents FACVC as a reproducible deterministic voltage-support benchmark.