Interesting…
from our point of view we run a little hot at our station regulators. 124 with a 2V bandwidth. We want to make all the money we can also..
Our PV loads have to be spaced out, simply because we don’t want issues with voltages running out of control.
I posted in another thread about too much PV on a line.
Simply put, you get a saturation of PV at the end of the line it’s not hard to get way out of band with the voltages.
Say you live out in rural areas.. your about a mile from the end of the line. There are 10 people between you and the end.
6 of them have solar…Voltage is 123 at the end. the first inverter is boosting the voltage to 125, second is boosting the voltage up to 127, third, etc…
If the inverters all boost by 2 volts that’s 12 volts total over the line impedance that offers little drop at all. Inverter tops out at 132V, so now all of them are fighting all day long and we get a call the voltage is too high.
what are we supposed to do?… DER caused this problem.
The regulators are set to co-gen so they don’t really regulate when the voltage flows backwards, as it’s different than the bi-directional setting. That setting can’t be used because the regulators fight the inverters until they drop off line. The regulators drop back down, the inverter comes back online, the regulator tries to regulate and it’s a cycle that doesn’t work.
Also, partly cloudy days have my phasors flipping back and forth so much the transformer relay doesn’t know what to do.
Now this isn’t meant to be an “it’s all DERs fault” post, because there is also the problem of POCOs having some really sorry maintenance going on. I know of utilities that install regulators, set the relays, and forget them. They run them to failure. What this means is none of the linemen truly have an understanding of what the relay sees and tells the regulator to do..
It also means the regulators screw up often before they fail. Taking one out of service (200/288) and sending it in for maintenance is about $3000 per regulator, each time it’s sent off.
As far as Electrofelons problem, it could simply be a wrong setting in the relay now that DER has been introduced.
As for the OP.. it could be #5.. There is too much DER on the line already and all the collective inverters are pushing the voltage way too high.
![Winking face :wink: 😉](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/6.6/png/unicode/64/1f609.png)