Selection of Distribution Feeders for Implementing Distributed Generation and Renewable Energy Applications

Climate change concerns mandated renewable portfolio standards, lucrative government incentives, and accelerated cost reduction in renewables, and distributed energy applications are driving steep growth in system installations. Distributed energy resources (DERs) are not commonly connected to a bulk power transmission system but are interconnected near the load in the electric power distribution system. DER includes renewable energy such as wind and solar, fossil-fuel-based generation (microturbines and small gas turbines), and distributed energy storage. In this paper, a novel methodology is developed that ranks utility feeders for implementation of DER systems. This performance index is based on peak-load reduction, increased system capacity, load-generation correlation, and feeder load growth. This is based on a statistical measure that quantifies the relationship between loads and the stochastic nature of renewable resources. This allows the utility to gain insight into improved benefits from nondispatchable renewable resources such as solar and wind technologies as well as dispatchable DER technologies.