Operational Performance Assessment of Power Distribution System Under Non-Conventional Distributed Generation

To fulfill the increasing energy requirement, many countries are integrating renewable energy resources at the customer’s end. This growth of distributed generation is also affecting the power network. The solar and wind, being the highly intermittent energy resources in nature, introduces certain inherent complexities in the power distribution network. Increased harmonic content is just one of these complexities. Others include distorted power quality, reduced power system flexibility, reduction in system resilience, and issues in power system stability limits. This work focuses to address the above-mentioned issues. To propose a suitable system for the integration of distributed generation (DG), a comparative study of a conventional and the proposed smart system at multiple penetration levels has been carried out. For the detailed analysis, IEEE 9 Bus System is taken as a conventional network and later on modified as per requirements. The proposed model is implemented in ETAP software. Harmonic analysis, load flow, short circuit, and transient stability analysis are performed by integrating DG at multiple voltage penetration levels. Afterwards, the impact of renewable energy resources (RESs) integrated as a distributed generation with the grid is analyzed. Results obtained show that the harmonic profile of the system can be minimized by implying DG through the virtual power plants (VPPs) concept. It is also observed that the power network’s transient profile is also least impacted if distributed generation is integrated in accordance with the virtual power plants (VPPs) concept. Moreover, the power quality is more accurate and least deteriorated if renewables are integrated as VPPs as compared to other integration techniques.