Active Power Curtailment in Power System Planning

Abstract

In regions with high penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), grid congestion is mostly caused by power feed-in of generators. In this context, conventional approaches for solving the grid congestion problems are Active Power Curtailment (APC) of DER and grid reinforcement. In the wake of increased DER generation, it is not only of interest how to obtain the grid reinforcement, but also how to consider APC during grid planning. The challenge of such grid planning is to determine the best combination of reinforcement and APC. We present a new grid planning method and use it to find the trade-off between APC and grid reinforcement in a case study of a High-Voltage (HV) grid with a future renewable energy scenario. We compare the proposed reinforcement method to two existing methods. With the combination of APC and grid reinforcement, the proposed method shows a decrease regarding the total expenditures.