Grid Reinforcement Costs with Increasing Penetrations of Distributed Energy Resources

With increasing penetrations of distributed energy resources (DERs) introduced to the distribution grids (DGs), these grids will require reinforcements. This study analyses the required grid reinforcement costs for six medium voltage (MV)-grids with underlying low voltage (LV)-grids and different characteristics to provide an estimate of the required costs and evaluate the cost reduction potential by utilising flexibility from the DERs. Therefore, increasing penetrations of photovoltaic (PV), battery energy storage systems (BESS), heat pumps (HPs) and electric vehicles (EVs) are added to residential loads of the grids. To quantify the cost reduction potential, the required grid reinforcement is determined for a reference and an optimised operation of the DERs. The results show that integrating HPs leads to the highest marginal and absolute costs and that HPs are the main driver of the costs when all DERs are integrated simultaneously. The optimised operation of the DERs can reduce the grid reinforcement costs for all simulated scenarios. However, the extent to which the grid reinforcement can be reduced differs. For home charging of EVs, grid reinforcement can be nearly completely avoided with the optimised operation. For PV with BESS and HPs, reductions of 45.2 % and 13.6 % at a 100 % penetration can be achieved, respectively. When all types of DERs are integrated simultaneously, it is possible to decrease the costs by 23.6 % with the optimised operation.