A Customer Centric Approach to the Use of Residential Batteries for Distribution Network Support

This paper proposes and practically validates a control approach for distribution network (DN) support with customers' battery energy storage systems (BESSs). Use of customers' BESSs for DN support incurs a cost (disutility) to customers because a part of the storage capacity is used for DN support instead of solely benefitting the customer. An optimization problem is formulated to perform a tradeoff between the benefits to network operator and disutility to consumers. Control actions, i.e., charge and discharge trajectories of BESSs, are obtained by solving the optimization problem. Hardware in the loop (HIL) simulations of the proposed method, using a real-time digital simulator and a dSPACE controller board, are performed to assess its performance on a low voltage distribution network. HIL simulations show that in the presence of rooftop solar, the method is able to reduce voltage excursions while simultaneously reducing customers' cost.