Impact of Load Simultaneity and Battery Layout on Sizing of Batteries for Preventing Grid Overloading

Abstract

Electrification of residential areas is increasingly common. Major areas of development include rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles and heat pumps. However, existing grid components may have insufficient network capacity to accommodate the resulting electricity flows. Battery energy storage (BES) can be used to prevent transformer overloading resulting from electrification. Ideally, BES should be sized and placed such that it can prevent overloading with a minimum amount of storage capacity, but it is unclear how load characteristics affect BES capacity requirements. This study investigated how load simultaneity affects the minimum BES capacity required to prevent transformer overloading, comparing a central with a distributed BES layout. It was found that as simultaneity increases, distributed storage requires relatively less capacity than central storage. This is likely due to the reduced ability of central BES to share capacity between connections as simultaneity increases, and the ability of distributed BES to better reduce transportation losses.