Congestion Management in distribution grid networks through active power control of flexible distributed energy resources

Abstract

With the increasing penetration levels of distributed energy resources (DER), grid congestion events may occur by causing severe damages and potential black outs in power systems. Developing innovative operation planning strategies and control tools for the grid congestion management is thus a primary goal for ensuring network reliability and security. In this paper, we propose a Grid Congestion Management Controller (GCMC) to solve grid congestion issues by controlling the active power of flexible DER (e.g. storage, flexible loads, electric vehicles, distributed generators) present in the grid, thus increasing availability of active resources to maintain the network stability. The GCMC is developed here as a self-contained control acting on distribution level, and will be further developed to be integrated in the INTEgrated opeRation PLANning tool, which will be the main outcome of the INTERPLAN H2020 project. INTERPLAN (Nov.2016Nov.2020) aims to provide an integrated tool to support transmission system operators and distribution system operators in the operation planning of the pan-European network. The GCMC effectiveness is tested in the presence of specific congestion events by using the Cigre benchmark grid model under different scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed control logic is efficient in mitigating grid congestion through optimally re-dispatching active power variation to the flexible DER connected to each busbar in the network.