From a distributing to a generating network: Assessing PV hosting capacity under uncertainty in distribution grids

Abstract:
The increasing installations of solar photovoltaic units poses great challenges to the safe and efficient operation of distribution grids. In order to combat climate change and achieve national targets for renewable energy, the hosting capacity for solar photovoltaic in low- and medium-voltage grids must be assessed. However, there is an insufficient database representing networks at these voltage levels due to confidentiality or missing measurements by distribution system operators, causing scientist to model distribution grids on public available data. While there are existing methods to extract individual topologies, there is no practical approach to represent distribution grids for largescale areas. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology (i) to create synthetic low- and medium-voltage distribution grids of a larger region (i.e., Switzerland) and (ii) assess the PV hosting capacity of distribution grids using an iterative Monte-Carlo based approach. We present a validation of our proposed methodology by comparing simulation results for the synthetic and real grid topology for a region in Switzerland.