EVALUATING INVESTMENT DEFERRAL BY INCORPORATING DISTRIBUTED GENERATION IN DISTRIBUTION NETWORK PLANNING

Abstract

Environmental concerns, the need to diversify the energy mix, together with technology advances have made Distributed Generation (DG) increase worldwide over recent decades. One of the major and well-recognised benefits of DG is its ability to defer future demand-related investments, providing potentially significant savings and competitive advantage for regulated Distribution Network Operators (DNOs). In this paper an approach that considers the successive elimination method and multistage planning is proposed in order to quantify the investment deferral brought about by DG. Here, each required reinforcement and its implementation schedule affected by the connection of DG can be clearly identified by the DNO. A typical UK distribution network circuit is evaluated. Results show that characteristics of DG such as location, size, power factor and the commissioning time can result in significant reductions of the total planning costs. The investment deferral per MW of connected DG is also investigated as an index that could assist DNOs in evaluating the attractiveness of potential connection points as well as in quantifying the benefit produced by DG.