Simulating Distributed Battery and Solar Array Placement for Voltage Regulation

Energy storage has been around for many years in the US, mainly in the form of pumped hydro. However, in recent years, other storage technologies have developed quickly, with lithium ion batteries receiving significant investment and delivering technological and price improvements. Electricity storage has the potential to assist the US in transitioning to a smarter grid, as well as enabling increasing amounts of renewable generation to connect to the grid, without costly reinforcement works. Electricity storage can be co-located with power generation assets, installed along distribution systems for network services, or placed behind the meter, i.e., on the customer’s premises. This thesis focuses on the latter case. Modern day electrical grids are complex and varied. Using a representative of a large number of grids we can simulate real world conditions and show how the system reacts to distributed solar arrays but can also show how the system can recover from voltage failures using residential sized distributed battery banks. It is hypothesized that through distributed use of battery systems that energy grids can facilitate a larger amount of renewable energy in regard to voltage and current limitations. The tasks to be performed include the following: • Establish a base case network using the IEEE test feeder with local TMY data and local load data with Gridlab-D • Establish a distributed and isolated number of solar arrays that real world outputs to cover how the grid would begin to fail relative to voltage and current limitations • Study the ability of the grid to recover from voltage violations with the use of residential sized distributed battery systems using three utilization variations. Time of use shifting, peak shaving, and negative power shifting. Based upon the found data we can discuss the added benefits of distributed battery systems and how they can be used to harden the grid against voltage failures