Technical assessment of microgrids integration into distribution systems

Currently, the microgrid scheme is considered as the future of distribution feeders operation. Nevertheless, there are several impacts associated to its implementation, and the distribution system operator (DSO) requires a planning signal to decide whether to integrate these schemes. This paper proposes a methodology to quantify the technical impacts of the integration of some elements of a microgrid, i.e., distributed generation (DG) power plants and electric vehicles (EVs) charging stations. To that end, a methodology based on steady state and dynamic simulations is proposed. This methodology compares the performance of the business as usual (BAU) case with different microgrid scenarios. The output of this comparison is a global index that contains information related to voltage profiles, elements loading, power losses, short circuit currents, and transient stability. Simulations are applied on a real test feeder, considering BAU and three microgrid scenarios, obtaining the global index for each configuration.