Investigating rules, criteria, and challenges for interconnection of distributed generation

Project (M.S., Electrical and Electronic Engineering) -- -- California State University, Sacramento, 2010.The purpose of this project is to gather and document the existing criteria, rules, and practices used by the Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) in California for physical interconnection of Distributed Generation (DG) and to identify existing technical issues and concerns associated with interconnections under the current rules. The criteria set by the National Standard IEEE 1547, California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Rule 21, and the standard practices used by a sample major IOU will be presented and compared. Implementation problems and issues associated with the presently used rules and criteria are documented and discussed. The project also intends to verify and further investigate any system protection related concerns using system modeling and simulations. Known protection related impacts due to relay desensitization and overstressed equipment will be simulated using industry level software, and the results from the analyses will be presented. Suggestions and recommendations will be provided for future research and studies in the interest of developing future criteria and recommended practices for DG interconnections. The project summarizes problems and issues with the interconnection of increasing levels of DG, which is one of the topics of major focus in electrical power systems.Electrical and Electronic Engineerin