Control and Management of Distribution Networks with Flexible Energy Resources

In the future, participation of all flexible energy resources in provision of different local and system-wide services like frequency control will be increasingly needed. This requires also more active contribution from distribution (MV and LV) network connected smaller scale distributed resources. However, today participation of these distribution network connected resources may be occasionally restricted due to local network limitations. In this paper, new local measurements based distributed energy resources control and active network management principles and settings are developed through PSCAD simulations. The proposed principles take into account seasonal variations and could simultaneously locally reduce the possibility of local distribution network restrictions as well as enable improved availability of all flexibilities for different local (distribution network) and whole power system (transmission network) level services. Simulations are focused on potential distributed energy resources control function interactions during challenging future scenarios with high distributed generation penetration and low / high load in steady-state, over-frequency and under-frequency situations. At the end, new control and management principles are proposed.