Quantitative Evaluation of Technical Solutions for Control of Distribution Grid with DERs

To reduce CO2 emission and support increasing power loads, distributed energy resources (DERs) such as electric vehicle (EV) and photovoltaics (PV), are being deployed into the distribution grid. This causes various issues and also provides controllability of load side to distribution grid. In this paper the penetration ratios of DERs in future are estimated according to their trends in China. Issues including overloading caused by EV in urban area, and overvoltage caused by PV in rural area are extracted based on simulation of typical grid models. Conventional technical solutions for these issues, such as hardware upgrading, tap changing, and local control of VAR devices, and new technical solutions, such as centralized control of VAR devices, and optimal control of DERs, are evaluated quantitatively on typical grid models. Key performance indicators (KPIs) of different technical solutions were compared, the result showed Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) is the best technical solution.