Chapter 9 - Distributed generation in deregulated energy markets and probabilistic hosting capacity decision-making challenges

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a notable development of renewable energy resources, and distributed generation (DG) is growing worldwide in response to their technical, economic, and environmental benefits. However, excessive DG penetration into electrical networks may lead to various operational problems and limit violations, such as overvoltage risks, overloading problems of transformers and feeders, increased line losses, protection system problems, and high harmonic distortion levels. These operational problems occur when the system violates its hosting capacity (HC) limit. Nowadays, many countries have started their transition into deregulated energy markets in response to their numerous merits and resiliency. The deregulated energy market achieves a competitive power-generation scheme through governmental generation companies, independent power producers, and DG investors. On the other side, electricity distribution through various distribution system operators (DSOs) ensures supplying customers with reliable and high-quality electrical supply in a cost-effective manner. Recently, a conflict of interest took place between the DG owners and DSOs. This is because investors aim to install more DG units, while DSOs are worried about these pushy DG integration requests. In this chapter the HC is introduced as a multifactor decision-making tool that provides a fair and clear approach to decide when new DG integration requests should be rejected or accepted. Various HC performance indices, such as overvoltage, thermal overloading, power quality, and protection problems, are explored and their impacts on deciding the optimum HC enhancement technique assessment are discussed. Finally, the benefits of utilizing the HC approach for both DG investors and DSOs are presented.