PNNL

Abstract

Non-utility owned distributed energy resources (DERs) can provide many grid services such as voltage regulation and service restoration, if properly controlled, and can improve the distribution system’s reliability when combined with utility-owned assets such as self-healing control and microgrids. This paper integrates transactive energy control into the distribution system reliability evaluation to quantitatively assess the impact of non-utility owned DERs on reliability improvement. A double-auction market is implemented to incentivize the DERs to provide reactive power support for improving voltage profiles thus enabling additional customer load restoration during an outage. Also, the operational sequence of utility owned self-healing control, utility owned microgrids and non-utility owned DERs is designed and integrated into the service restoration process with the operational constraints guaranteed by checking the three-phase unbalanced power flow for post-fault network reconfiguration. The reliability indices are then calculated through a Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed method is tested on a four-feeder distribution system operated by Duke Energy. Results demonstrate great potential of using a transactive energy based system to engage non-utility owned DERs for improving distribution system reliability.