Residential Demand Response-Based Load-Shifting Scheme to Increase Hosting Capacity in Distribution System

Abstract

Increasing the use of solar photovoltaic (PV) generation in order to decarbonize the electric energy system results in many challenges. Overvoltage is one of the most common problems in distribution systems with high penetration of solar PV. Utilizing demand-side resources such as residential demand response (RDR) have the potential to alleviate this problem. To increase the solar PV hosting capacity, we propose an RDR based load-shifting scheme that utilizes the interaction between the distribution system operator (DSO) and demand-side resources. We first model a customer utility that consists of the cost of purchasing power, revenue from the subsidy, and discomfort due to load shifting. When an overvoltage problem is expected, DSO issues a local subsidy, and customers in the distribution system move their load in response. An optimization framework that minimizes the additional cost due to the subsidy while keeping the voltages in a prescribed range is proposed. Because of the non-linearity of the power flow analysis, we propose a sub-optimal algorithm to obtain a subsidy, prove the performance gap between the optimal subsidy and the subsidy obtained by the algorithm. A case study shows that the proposed RDR scheme increases the hosting capacity to almost its theoretical limit at a lower cost than the curtailment method.