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Abstract
This project proposes smart power distribution system for optimal dispatch of power in residential and industrial areas. Decentralized methods for computing optimal real and reactive power set points for residential photovoltaic (PV) inverters are developed in this project. It is known that conventional PV inverters which are designed to extract maximum power at unity power factor, cannot address secondary performance objectives such as voltage regulation and network loss minimization. Optimal power flow techniques can be utilized to select which inverters will provide ancillary services and to compute their optimal real and reactive power set points according to well-defined performance criteria and economic objectives. Since the computational burden is shared among multiple devices and the requirement of all-to-all communication can be circumvented, the proposed optimization approach scales favourably to large distribution networks.The proposed decentralized strategy is also used for preparing an energy audit report which provides the real time monitoring of power consumption among various loads.