Automated quantification of PV hosting capacity in distribution networks under user-defined control and optimisation procedures

Abstract

With the rising popularity of photovoltaic (PV) power, utility companies are experiencing a growing number of interconnection requests on their networks. Combined with power quality issues, the distribution system operator (DSO) must go through strenuous impact studies before proceeding to the installation of PV systems. To address this issue, this work proposes a tool to rapidly and accurately compute the total PV hosting capacity (PVHC) of their network. Moreover, the proposed tool allows the implementation of user-defined control strategies in order to assess their beneficial effects with respect to the PVHC. In this prospect, we investigated the impact of smart PV inverters. We implemented this tool as a plugin for PowerFactory and tested it on the CIGRE benchmark distribution grid. First, we determined the PVHC with inverters injecting at unity power factor, then we estimated the gains brought by smart inverter control (SIC). The latter increased the hosting capacity by up to 19.7 %.