Quantifying Hosting Capacity for Rooftop PV System in LV Distribution Grids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a constructive, geometrically-based method for accurately determining the hosting capacity of rooftop PV systems in low voltage distribution grids, addressing non-convexity and computational challenges.

Contribution

It proposes a novel constructive model that guarantees global optimality for hosting capacity estimation, incorporating realistic constraints and parallel computation for practical use.

Findings

Successfully validated on IEEE standard systems with global optimal solutions.

Achieved faster computation through parallel processing techniques.

Demonstrated effectiveness in handling unbalanced three-phase conditions.

Abstract

Power systems face increasing challenges on reliable operations due to the widespread distributed generators (DGs), e.g., rooftop PV system in the low voltage (LV) distribution grids. Characterizing the hosting capacity (HC) is vital for assessing the total amount of distributed generations that a grid can hold before upgrading. For analyzing HC, some methods conduct extensive simulations, lacking theoretical guarantees and can time-consuming. Therefore, there are also methods employing optimization over all necessary operation constraints. But, the complexity and inherent non-convexity lead to non-optimal solutions. To solve these problems, this paper provides a constructive model for HC determination. Based on geometrically obtained globally optimal HC, we construct HC solutions sequentially according to realistic constraints, so that we can obtain optimal solution even with non-convex model. For practical adaption, we also consider three-phase unbalance condition and parallel computation to speed-up. We validated our method by extensive numerical results on IEEE standard systems, such as 8-bus and 123-bus radial distribution grids, where the global optimums are obtained and performance illustrations are demonstrated.