Hosting Capacity Estimate Based on Photovoltaic Distributed Generation Deployment: A Case Study in a Campus of the University of São Paulo

Abstract

Distributed generation, which is mainly deployed with PV systems that benefit economically prosumers, has soared in use in Brazil. Despite this, PV capacity in excess may cause technical issues which concern planning engineers who have adopted rules of thumb to screen interconnection requests without any detailed study. Recently, the hosting capacity concept has been employed to assess how much PV capacity a distribution grid can host without deteriorating grid parameters, reliability, or power quality. A steady-state and worst-case-based scenario was used to run deterministic power flow simulations to estimate the hosting capacity of a specific radial circuit at a campus of the University of São Paulo, referred to as “USP-105”. Although the result may be not completely accurate, it was found that USP-105 can accommodate 103% of its peak load or 4970.6 kW of PV power, which reduced the circuit’s annual peak load by 9%. Another finding was that hosting capacity increased when PV-DG deployment was dispersed along the circuit rather than concentrated on a single location (e.g., closest, or furthest to the substation). Utilities may therefore benefit from a simple and quick assessment to obtain an overview of how specific circuits behave on PV deployment and indicate which locations are technically more beneficial.