A Review of Methods for Assessing DER Hosting Capacity of Power Distribution Systems

This paper presents a comprehensive bibliographic review of the methods for assessing the capacity of electric power distribution systems to host distributed energy resources (DER). Through a structured search at the IEEE Xplore and Scopus databases, this review identifies that the main performance indexes used for hosting capacity assessment are voltage issues, line and transformer overloading, protection issues, and harmonics. This review also identifies that, in the literature, the main approaches for assessing the hosting capacity are: simplified methods, deterministic load flow, stochastic load flow-based methods, and optimization-based methods. Each one of them is critically discussed and summarized. The paper also provides recommendations for new hosting capacity studies.