A planning scheme for penetrating embedded generation in power distribution grids

Abstract

Penetrating Embedded Generation, or Distributed Generation (DG), in power distribution grids presents great benefits and substantial positive social impacts to utilities, system operators and electricity consumers. Existing research and practices on DG penetration planning have a few deficiencies: (1) limited to specific system configurations and capacities; (2) inaccurate and tending to lose its optimality in application to specific scenario; (3) computationally expensive in time and space; and (4) in need of considerable investment in sensors, communication assets, and retrofitting equipment with control functionalities. This thesis proposes a planning scheme for DG penetration in distribution systems that maximizes DG penetration's benefit, in terms of power delivery loss reduction, and restricts its adverse impact of steady-state voltage rise. A unique approach is taken to simplify the DG penetration problem with two sets of rules that describes the interaction of DG penetration and power delivery loss and voltage profiles in distribution systems. The proposed planning scheme is generally applicable to any distribution system regardless of its configuration and load capacity. More importantly, it is a theoretical toolkit that can provide users an intuition how DG penetration affects the performance of a distribution system. The policy makers, regulators, industries and utilities will be able to use this toolkit, without going through complicated computations, as guidelines to make policies, standards and decisions in DG penetration and related business.