Impacts of Community and Distributed Energy Storage Systems on Unbalanced Low Voltage Networks
For distribution network operators, this paper provides a comparative analysis of ESS deployment strategies in realistic unbalanced LV networks.
This paper analyzes the benefits of energy storage systems (ESS) in unbalanced low voltage networks, finding that both community and distributed ESS reduce power losses and improve hosting capacity and network unbalance, with distributed ESS performing slightly better.
Energy storage systems (EES) are expected to be an indispensable resource for mitigating the effects on networks of high penetrations of distributed generation in the near future. This paper analyzes the benefits of EES in unbalanced low voltage (LV) networks regarding three aspects, namely, power losses, the hosting capacity and network unbalance. For doing so, a mixed integer quadratic programmming model (MIQP) is developed to minimize annual energy losses and determine the sizing and placement of ESS, while satisfying voltage constraints. A real unbalanced LV UK grid is adopted to examine the effects of ESS under two scenarios: the installation of one community ESS (CESS) and multiple distributed ESSs (DESSs). The results illustrate that both scenarios present high performance in accomplishing the above tasks, while DESSs, with the same aggregated size, are slightly better. This margin is expected to be amplified as the aggregated size of DESSs increases.