Analysis of Complementary Load Profiles for Optimal Use of Power Flow Controllers in Low-Voltage Grid Areas

Abstract:
Within a low-voltage (LV) grid area, grid consumers can be assigned to specific consumer classes, whereby the temporal load profiles – for example between commercial and household consumers – differ significantly. However, with the rising integration of photovoltaic systems (PV), electric vehicles (EV) and heat pumps (HP), the loads on the LV grid are increasing and the resulting profiles become more volatile and weather dependent. In extreme cases, grid bottlenecks can occur that jeopardize the security of supply. A promising approach to solving this problem is the use of power flow controllers (PFC), which are installed between two grid points with complementary load profiles in order to control power flows and avoid grid bottlenecks. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the temporal complementarity between two load profiles, to evaluate the suitability of PFCs and identify the load shifting potential for supportive coupling. The proposed method takes power time series of equal length and temporal resolution as input, of which one time series is defined as the reference time series and the other time series is the shifting series. A threshold is set to identify overload situations in the reference profile. At each time step where this threshold is exceeded, the potential for shifting active power is calculated. Based on these values, a novel metric is proposed for checking the shifting potential. The results show that the best coupling occurs between residential and commercial consumer groups.