Alleviating power line congestion through the use of a renewable generation

Over the past few decades, there has been an ever-increasing penetration of Renewable Energy Generation in the power grid. However, unlike in the past, where fossil fuel generating plants are mostly located in remote areas, and in the proximity of the source of energy, the most common of the renewable generations, such as solar power systems, are haphazardly sited close to the loads because the source of energy, the sun, exists almost everywhere. This unplanned siting of renewable generating systems aggravates the power distribution lines congestion that already exists due to the power distribution deregulation. This paper presents a procedure that takes advantage of utilization and proper placement of Photovoltaic (PV) power systems to alleviate power line congestion. In this procedure, the base case load flow, without the solar generating system, is performed on the distribution network. And the bus with the lowest voltage is identified; this low voltage bus is indicative of congestion in the lines connecting the identified bus. A PV power system is then tied to that bus; the capacity of the PV generation is varied heuristically to determine the optimality that mitigates the congestion on the lines. The procedure is followed to test a 9-bus IEEE power system, and the results are presented.