Emergency reconfiguration and distribution system planning under the Single-Contingency Policy

Abstract

Emergency reconfiguration can improve distribution systems' reliability by enabling load transfer among substations. Previous studies, although present its operation strategies, seldom explore emergency reconfiguration's effects on distribution system planning. This paper explores how reconfiguration affects planning decisions and what benefits reconfiguration can bring to distribution system planning. For this purpose, two specific planning problems, planning substation capacity and allocating transformers, are studied under the Single-Contingency Policy (SCP). LP models are developed to find the optimal decisions in above problems. The main implications of this paper are: (1) enabling reconfigurable feeders can increase reliability with lower capital investment and operational cost when comparing to reinforcing transformer capacity; (2) the max-load of individual substation depends on its neighboring substations' characteristics; (3) the reliability of a set of well interconnected substations depends on the max-shortage of one of its substations; and (4) allocating transformers according to distribution networks' reconfiguration capability can improve distribution systems' reliability.