Benefits of advanced PV power forecasts for congestion management and reactive power management at the distribution level

New regulatory developments in the German energy sector, such as the introduction of the Redispatch 2.0 procedure or the discussion of market-based procurement procedures for reactive power, drive the need for grid operators to integrated forecasts of distributed generation in their operational planning procedures. In this paper, the benefits of advanced photovoltaic (PV) power forecasts for the use cases congestion management and reactive power management are analyzed for a real German MV grid. The results show that advanced PV power forecasts can improve the congestion forecasting at the distribution level, which can lead to a reduction of ad-hoc DER curtailment and unnecessary scheduled DER curtailment. For the reactive power management use case, advanced PV power forecasts can partly also enhance PV reactive power flexibility forecasts. However, the benefit depends on the considered DER reactive power capability.