Published in IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics (Volume: 9, Issue: 4, July 2019) and presented at the 7th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion (WCPEC-7), in Waikoloa, HI, USA, in June 2018
This paper presents a graph-based forward looking algorithm applied to distribution planning in the context of distributed photovoltaic penetration. We study the target hosting capacity problem where the objective is to find the least-cost sequence of system upgrades to reach a predefined hosting capacity target value. We show that commonly used short-term cost minimization approaches often lead to suboptimal long-term solutions. By comparing our method against such myopic techniques on real distribution systems, we show that our algorithm is able to reduce the overall integration costs by looking at future decisions. Because hosting capacity is hard to compute, this problem requires efficient methods to search the space. We demonstrate that heuristics using domain-specific knowledge can be efficiently used to improve the algorithm performance, such that real distribution systems can be studied.
@ARTICLE{8721148,
author={N. {Gensollen} and K. {Horowitz} and B. {Palmintier} and F. {Ding} and B. {Mather}},
journal={IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics},
title={Beyond Hosting Capacity: Using Shortest-Path Methods to Minimize Upgrade Cost Pathways},
year={2019},
volume={9},
number={4},
pages={1051-1056},
keywords={cost reduction;costing;distributed power generation;graph theory;minimisation;photovoltaic power systems;power distribution economics;minimization approaches;graph-based forward looking algorithm;predefined hosting capacity target value;system upgrades;least-cost sequence;target hosting capacity problem;distributed photovoltaic penetration;distribution planning;minimize upgrade cost pathways;shortest-path methods;algorithm performance;integration costs;distribution
systems;Photovoltaic systems;Heuristic algorithms;Tools;Regulators;Voltage control;Renewable energy sources;Decisions;hosting capacity;optimization;shortest path},
doi={10.1109/JPHOTOV.2019.2904540},
ISSN={2156-3403},
month={July},}