A Transmission System Friendly Micro-grid: Optimising Active Power Losses

Looking to the future, there are several challenges that electricity networks will face: prosperity, global sustainable growth and security. The electricity industry situation is complex because resources worldwide are becoming scarce and the need for sustainable growth is important. Dealing with this challenge led to the foundation of micro-grids. The classical “micro-grid” defines a mix of distributed energy resources (DER) capable of providing sufficient and continuous energy to a significant portion of the internal demand. Transmission system friendly micro-grids is a novel concept to encourage the power electronic converters to provide grid services and functionalities in line with new standards such as IEEE 1547- 2018. This paper presents a method for reducing losses by injecting reactive power from the grid-connected DER. The methodology is developed in Python and the system is modelled in DIgSILENT PowerFactory. The paper includes numerical results of the proposed methodology to show the suitability of the proposed concept.