Rooftop Photovoltaic Hosting Capacity Assessment: A Case Study of Rural Distribution Grids in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

Negative impacts of large-scale rooftop photovoltaic (PV) penetration may cause performance deterioration of distribution grids. Consequently, a rooftop PV hosting capacity analysis is becoming a concern of utility. In this work, a proposed method based on Monte Carlo process is developed to assess the PV hosting capacities on the basis of substation power factor. To consider the actual conditions, three selected feeders including feeder F1, feeder F2, and feeder F3, with distinct grid characteristics from Yogyakarta Province of Indonesia are employed. To obtain a detailed result of the rooftop PV hosting capacity, the customer with rooftop PV is randomly selected one by one. The proposed method is performed with over/undervoltage, substation power factor and reverse power flow limit. The comparative study is provided to investigate the impacts of the operational limits on the rooftop PV hosting capacity. Since the load demand and PV output vary with the time, the analyses are conducted in a time-series framework. In this work, constant PQ of loads is assigned, and all rooftop PV systems are assumed to have unity power factor. The results show that the substation power factor limit is more restrictive compared to overvoltage limit and reverse power flow limit. The substation power factor limits the rooftop PV penetration on feeder F1, feeder F2, and feeder F3, respectively, 86.52%, 79.37%, and 85.85% faster than reverse power flow limit. The results also indicate that the substation power factor decreases with the increasing of rooftop PV penetration.