  Volt/var control (VVC) of smart PV inverter is becoming one of the most
popular solutions to address the voltage challenges associated with high PV
penetration. This work focuses on the local droop VVC recommended by the grid
integration standards IEEE1547, rule21 and addresses their major challenges
i.e. appropriate parameters selection under changing conditions, and the
control being vulnerable to instability (or voltage oscillations) and
significant steady state error (SSE). This is achieved by proposing a two-layer
local real-time adaptive VVC that has two major features i.e. a) it is able to
ensure both low SSE and control stability simultaneously without compromising
either, and b) it dynamically adapts its parameters to ensure good performance
in a wide range of external disturbances such as sudden cloud cover, cloud
intermittency, and substation voltage changes. A theoretical analysis and
convergence proof of the proposed control is also discussed. The proposed
control is implementation friendly as it fits well within the integration
standard framework and depends only on the local bus information. The
performance is compared with the existing droop VVC methods in several
scenarios on a large unbalanced 3-phase feeder with detailed secondary side
modeling.
