A Battery Based Solution to Overvoltage Problems in Low Voltage Distribution Networks with Micro Generation

During the past years, governments throughout the world have been encouraging the installation of renewable energy systems to cope with environmental goals. In this framework, there has been a significant increase in the number of energy producers on the consumers’side, majorly due to photovoltaic and wind energy microgeneration.This has brought some concerns in voltage control on buses far away from the substation. The present paperanalyses the impact of these microgeneration systems on the low voltage grid, namely in what concerns overvoltage issues. For this purpose, both stochastic models to predict solar irradiance and wind speed and a threephase power flow algorithm to compute voltages on the buses of a test network are used. The probabilistic power flow study, carried on using Monte Carlo methods, reveals the possibility of overvoltage problems. A solution based on batteries attached to the micro generators is proposed to cope with this issue. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the solution, as a way to decrease over voltages, while preserving the producers’ revenues.