A Low-Voltage Mitigation Method for Rural Distribution Transformer Areas Based on Power-Mileage Aggregation

Low-voltage violations in rural distribution transformer areas (RDTAs) are a persistent and widespread problem in China, affecting over 5% of such areas and compromising the power supply quality for millions of rural end-users. These violations are primarily caused by long supply distances, undersized conductors, dispersed load distributions, and low power factors at terminal feeders, resulting in degraded equipment performance, increased line losses, and hindered integration of renewable distributed generation. The key to mitigating such violations lies in the rapid and coordinated regulation of primary equipment. Considering the actual equipment configurations in rural distribution transformer areas, a low-voltage mitigation method based on power-mileage aggregation is proposed. First, a generative adversarial network is employed to preprocess the collected electrical data, and device ranging is achieved through power-line characteristic pulses, enabling the spatiotemporal distribution analysis of low-voltage phenomena. Second, based on the line lengths from power sources—including distributed generators, soft open points, energy storage systems, and distribution transformers—to the smart meters, a power-mileage aggregation metric is developed to quantify the impact of power-source output variations on low-voltage meters. Subsequently, with the objective of minimizing the power mileage for low-voltage mitigation, the Newton iteration method is applied to determine the optimal output powers of energy storage systems and soft open points. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through case studies. Comparative analyses with optimal power flow, second-order cone programming, and interval robust control demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior low-voltage mitigation performance while maintaining higher economic efficiency.