Routing strategy for DC power grid with electric power routers.

Summary The power grid constructed with electric power router (EPR) will have the ability of flexibly controlling the voltage and power flow on each line of the grid, which will be helpful to maximize the integration of the renewable distributed generation to the grid. Most of the current methods for transmitting energy depend on storage unit or large scale calculation, which are relatively difficult. To avoid these disadvantages, this paper proposed a two‐step routing strategy based on the improved shortest path method for DC power grid with EPRs. The improved shortest path method combines Shortest Path Faster Algorithm (SPFA) with depth first search (DFS) algorithm, which could handle the negative weights and the negative cycle issue in the graph of the power flow paths. The increase of the transmission line power loss and the EPR's power loss are taken as the weight for the path search method to evaluate the cost of the path. Applying the proposed method to each power demand and supply finally helps to obtain the current distribution of the whole grid. By analysis of typical scenarios, compared with the power flow distribution of traditional DC power grid, the one produced by the proposed strategy could improve the power transmission capability as well as reduce the maximum voltage drop in the network. Besides, this strategy introduces less power loss, than many other ways do, in power routing. The effectiveness of the rioting strategy is related to the configuration of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]