Hourly-assessment of grid hosting capacity for active distribution network

To support increasing penetration of small PV sources within existing distribution networks, there is an increasing interest in providing supporting, monitoring and controlling infrastructure to transform from passive to Active Distribution Networks (ADN). In order to operate ADN in an optimal way, the Hosting Capacity (HC) measure related to the maximum feasible capacity of PV sources should be estimated on an hourly basis. In this paper, HC has been estimated by conducting stochastic simulations in which the uncertainties of the solar irradiance and load variation are considered. The spatial correlations among PVs and loads have been taken into account by utilizing the N ataf transformation. Two performance indices based on technical violations (overvoltage and overloading) are established in order to depict the deterioration in the operational performance as the number of PV connections increase. Both the number and severity of a technical violation for each hour are considered. The relative frequency distribution is used to compute the probabilistic expectation and percentiles for each violation. The method is tested on large distribution network with several feeders and sub-feeders located in South Australia.