Determining Optimal Battery Storage along a Distribution Feeder

Battery storage is an important upcoming technology for the distribution grid. This paper examines the optimal size, allocation and schedule of battery storage for a real distribution feeder. The selected feeder is operating close to its capacity. Hence, the storage is designed with the primary goal of mitigating the overloads in the system, with minimization of power loss as the secondary goal. The size of the storage required to mitigate the overloads is determined from time series power flow analysis. For allocation and scheduling of this storage, the problem is cast as an optimization with minimum active power loss as the objective. As a validation, the obtained storage is implemented in OpenDSS time series simulation to verify that the overloads are eliminated. Further, the impacts of increasing solar photovoltaic (PV) penetration and load growth on the storage size, allocation and schedule are shown to affect the required storage significantly.