IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 53

of native load that a utility must be prepared to support in
the event of a sudden DER shutdown. Figure 3 shows the
voltage profile of a particular feeder with several hundred
single-phase connected photovoltaic DERs as calculated by
the state estimator. The blue, red, and green traces represent
the voltages on the three phases as one travels away from
the substation on the left. Obviously, the display heading
"Voltage Drop Profile" is a misnomer in this case where the
phase voltages are rising as more photovoltaics are encountered moving to the right, away from the substation. The
IVVO function can recognize that high-voltage limits have
been violated and recommend a plan consisting of power
factor or reactive power set points for the DER smart inverters to mitigate the violations. IVVO is a good tool to orchestrate this collection of highly distributed DER controls with
the tap-changing equipment and capacitors on the feeder.
The capability of an ADMS to communicate with standard
protocols like IEEE Standard 2030.5 allows the corrective
set points to be sent to an aggregator communicating with
the smart inverters.
A dashboard summary of DER activity downstream of a
particular substation transformer bank is shown in Figure 4.
On the left is a geographic presentation of feeders with highlighted DER locations in cyan and high voltage violation locations indicated by white stars. The lower chart in the middle
shows 36-h forecasted DER injections summarized by type.
The upper chart shows the corresponding transformer bank

net flow in green as well as the actual native load on the feeders in yellow. At the peak of the forecasted DER injections,
the bank flow actually becomes negative with backfeed. For
these time-series look-ahead analyses, the ADMS distribution power flow is run multiple times with forecasted load
and DER injections as inputs.

Summary
An ADMS with advanced applications is a powerful tool to
give operators greater situational awareness and coordinate
grid automation investments, such as automated switches,
tap-changing equipment, AMIs, and even DERs via smart
inverters. The digital transformation of distribution utilities is providing an unprecedented number of measurements
from the field, and the advanced applications can automatically process the observations and turn them into actionable
information and control recommendations much more effectively than humans alone can. A fundamental component
of the ADMS is a large, complex, and constantly changing
model representing the as-operated distribution power system. The advanced applications, such as FLISR and IVVO,
as well as the outage management application all depend
upon this physics-based model to provide optimal value to
the utility. The creation and maintenance of the model is key
to the success of an advanced applications implementation.
The sheer magnitude and dynamic nature of the distribution power system model dictate that utilities will need to

figure 3. A phase-by-phase-voltage profile of a feeder with high photovoltaic penetration. The blue, red, and green
traces represent the voltages on the three phases as one travels away from the substation on the left.
january/february 2020

ieee power & energy magazine

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020