Australia has seen a strong uptake of residential PV systems over the last five years, with small scale distributed generation systems now accounting for around 10% of peak capacity within the Australian National Electricity Market. As uptake further increases, there is concern about the ability of distribution networks to maintain reliability and power quality without requiring substantial additional infrastructure investment, and in some locations PV installations are no longer being allowed. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of real and reactive power control of distributed PV inverter systems, to maintain and improve network power quality. High resolution PV output data has been collected at a number of trial sites in Newcastle, Australia and network impact simulations undertaken for an example long rural feeder gathered from the Australian National Feeder Taxonomy Study. These show how localised PV inverter controls can regulate distribution network voltages, reduce network losses, increase the network hosting capacity and hence the uptake of distributed renewable energy. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.