Technical and Economic Assessments of Electricity Distribution Networks with Active Customers

With a deepening penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs), distribution network service providers (DNSP) in most jurisdictions are faced with the challenge of designing tariff structures that are reflective of forward-looking network capacity costs, while ensuring a non-discriminatory, secure and reliable network for all end-users. Nonetheless, most electricity users seek to minimise their energy expenditure by participating in demand response programs or by actively managing their energy use through a home energy management system. Thus, DNSPs need to send accurate price signals to customers if they must achieve the desired peak demand targets. However, with inefficient pricing in place, DNSP loss in revenue and unfair cost allocation between customers may result. This thesis aims to address these challenges through a systematic technical and economic assessment of distribution networks with DER-enabled customers. To begin, a review of the performance of the state-of-the-art energy management methods is done in view of practicality and computational requirements while critiquing the modelling assumptions of each method. Next, a techno-economic assessment of grid defection is performed, based on the trade-off between the reliability and the levelised cost of electricity of residential PV-battery systems. Afterwards, the techno-economic impacts of different network tariffs, on low voltage networks are evaluated considering grid-connected customers, under various PV-battery penetration levels. Lastly, a benchmark for measuring the cost-reflectivity of network tariffs using cooperative game theory is proposed, which fairly apportions network costs to several customers with minimal error and computational burden. In brief, this thesis provides tools and analyses to guide DNSPs in designing DER-specific network tariffs which better signals network cost drivers, thus fostering customer participation while improving the equity of network cost allocations even with high DER penetration levels