Hosting Capacity Enhancement in Distribution System in Highly Trenchant Photo-Voltaic Environment: A Hardware in Loop Approach

The gradual fossil fuel depletion, the exponential increase in load, the environmental, social and political concern has lead to the gradual sprawl of distributed energy resources in the form of microgrid. But disproportionate integration of DERs into the conventional power system may result in the anomalous system behavior causing violation of operational limits i.e., under and overvoltage, thermal overloading, line losses, transformer or feeder overloading, harmonic distortion breaching the standards, mal-operation of the protective devices etc. The key to mitigate these violations is appropriate hosting capacity assessment. This paper proposes the concept of customary hosting capacity and enhanced hosting capacity at all nodes in a network with low voltage level, high voltage level, ampacity and total harmonic distortion as the governing criteria. The analysis is tested on reconfigured IEEE 33 bus distribution system, whose reconfiguration is achieved by particle swarm optimization, keeping loss minimization as the objective function. The attainment of enhanced hosting capacity is significant since it may lead to considerable improvement of voltage in the network, maintaining the line current values very low. The experimentation on reconfigured and base configuration of IEEE 33 bus distribution system is performed in MATLAB and validated in hardware in loop. The results are also compared with existing literature to prove its efficacy.