Electro-thermal Resource Interaction to Accommodate Inevitable Uncertain Events of Distribution Network

Transition of the power system towards a carbon-neutral grid with increased prosumers at the distribution end motivates the distribution market to be more robust. Rare uncertain events like power supply failures from the main grid due to contingencies, high forecast errors, etc., could adversely impact the distribution system’s operations. In such situations, distribution system operators (DSOs) are forced to curtail the load at the cost of high economic losses and consumers’ discomfort. This entails the DSOs to be more diligent to accommodate these rare, inevitable, and uncertain events. Electro-thermal interaction could significantly help the DSO to maintain an economical and reliable system. In this regard, this work formulates the distribution optimal power flow (D-OPF) to accommodate these rare events and prevent the system from collapsing or heavy load shedding via efficient deployment of the network’s available resources. The efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated on IEEE 33-bus radial distribution system considering different real-time scenarios. The results highlight the primacy of simultaneous modeling of electro-thermal resources to cater for the distribution network under uncertain events in an economically efficient way.