COMPARISON OF POWER FLOW ANALYSIS TOOLS UNDER HIGH RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES INTEGRATION: APPLICATION TO ENGINEERING BACHELOR DEGREES

Nowadays, different commercial and open-source power system solutions are currently available to solve power flow and optimal power flow problems for educational and professional purposes. Examples of commercial packages are DIgSILENT PowerFactory, PowerWorld, SIMPOW and NEPLAN. Non-commercial solutions include MATPOWER, pandapower and PyPSA. With the massive integration of renewable energy sources into power systems, mainly wind and PV installations at distribution level, voltage regulation in such distribution systems is frequently suggested by means of coordinated On Load Tap Changers (OLTC) transformers and reactive power compensation strategies. However, OLTC is not usually available for open-source packages. Due to the expensive cost of commercial software's licenses, open-source solutions are currently considered as a remarkable option for education and teaching; giving the students the possibility to carry out different analysis and simulations at home. By these means, this paper compares two different tools: a commercial (DIgSILENT PowerFactory) and an open-source (pandapower) software focused on power flow analysis at distribution level under high RES integration. An OLTC transformer model has been developed for pandapower, comparing and evaluating the results with DIgSILENT PowerFactory simulations. The considered power system scenarios have different RES integration percentages in line with current RES integration road-maps. Results, comparison and discussion are also included in the paper.