Photovoltaic Hosting Capacity of Feeders with Reactive Power Control and Tap Changers

This paper finds photovoltaic (PV) hosting capacity of power distribution network considering a number of PV injection nodes, reactive power support from PVs, and control of load tap changers (LTCs). In the developed method, several minute by minute simulations are run based on randomly chosen PV injection nodes, daily PV output profiles, and daily load profiles from a pool of high-resolution realistic data set. The simulation setup is built using OpenDSS and MATLAB. The performance of the proposed method is investigated in the IEEE 123-node distribution feeder for multiple scenarios. The case studies are performed particularly for one, two, five, and ten PV injection nodes looking at the maximum voltage deviations. Case studies show that the PV hosting capacity of the 123-node feeder greatly differs with the number of PV injection nodes. We have observed that distributed PVs increase hosting capacity of the feeders compared to large PVs at few nodes. We have also observed that the PV hosting capacity increases with reactive power support and with the control of LTCs.