Parallel Hosting Capacity Analysis for Integrated Transmission and Distribution Planning

With the rapid development of smart grid technology, the complexity of interactions between transmission and distribution systems has drastically increased. To acquire the power flow solution that reflects these interactions, transmission and distribution (T&D) co-simulation has become an essential tool. However, most of the existing co-simulation methods may lack the capability to handle a large-scale T&D system due to the limited computational capability. In this work, a T&D co-simulation platform is implemented to overcome the computational issue and perform large-scale T&D co-simulation tasks. The highperformance computing (HPC) clusters at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) provide a parallel computing environment to reduce the co-simulation runtime. To realize the power system co-simulation, an open-source co-simulation framework, Hierarchical Engine for Large-scale Infrastructure Co-Simulation (HELICS), is utilized as a core component to coordinate the data exchanges between transmission and distribution simulators. This HPC enabled co-simulation platform is utilized to perform hosting capacity analysis (HCA) for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) 179-bus system with synthetic California feeders. Parallelism is implemented at both T&D coupling and penetration scenario levels. A speedup of 92.42 is observed for the parallel T&D HCA.