Volume 14: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part III

Optimal Operation of Soft Open Points to Minimize Energy Curtailment of Distributed Generation in Electricity Distribution Networks Xun Jiang, Wenlong Ming, Yue Zhou, Jianzhong Wu

Abstract

As a power electronic device, Soft Open Point (SOP) offers increasingly valuable flexible and accurate power flow control for electricity distribution networks. In this paper, SOPs are optimized to minimize energy curtailment of distributed generation. The optimal operating set-points of SOPs are determined by using a multi-period non-linear optimization model. The optimization model adopts minimum energy curtailment of distributed generation as the objective, while considering the constraints of power losses and physical limits of SOPs and power output limits of distributed generation simultaneously. At the input of the model, load variation is considered by generating random power loading conditions via Monte Carlo simulation. As such, the results of minimum energy curtailment of the model can be analyzed statistically. The methodology is demonstrated on a modified IEEE 33-bus system with different SOP cases. The performance of SOP is evaluated comparing to the case without SOP, and the results show that an SOP can effectively reduce minimum energy curtailment by 84% on average. The impacts of location, capacity and number of SOPs on the performance are also analyzed respectively.

Keywords energy curtailment, distributed generation, soft open point, load variation, Monte Carlo simulation