2024/08/12 by Andrey Churkin, Wangwei Kong, Churkin, Andrey +5
Engineering · #FOS: Electrical engineering #Power System Reliability and Maintenance #Power Systems and Technologies #Smart Grid Energy Management #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.06516
openalex publication_date 2024/08/12 · openalex created_date 2024/09/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DER) offers new opportunities for distribution system operators (DSO) to improve network operation through flexibility services. To utilise flexible resources, various DER flexibility aggregation methods have been proposed, such as the concept of aggregated P-Q flexibility areas. Yet, many existing studies assume perfect coordination among DER and rely on single-phase power flow analysis, thus overlooking barriers to flexibility aggregation in real unbalanced systems. To quantify the impact of these barriers, this paper proposes a three-phase optimal power flow (OPF) framework for P-Q flexibility assessment, implemented as an open-source Julia tool 3FlexAnalyser.jl. The framework explicitly accounts for voltage unbalance and imperfect coordination among DER in low voltage (LV) distribution networks. Simulations on an illustrative 5-bus system and a real 221-bus LV network in the UK reveal that over 30% of the theoretical aggregated flexibility potential can be lost due to phase unbalance and lack of coordination across phases. These findings highlight the need for improved flexibility aggregation tools applicable to real unbalanced distribution networks.