Detailed analysis of network losses in a million customer distribution grid with high penetration of distributed generation

Abstract

Understanding network losses is important regarding energy efficiency and grid regulation. A method was developed to determine grid losses for each voltage level of a distribution grid and to investigate the influence of distributed generation and reactive power. The losses in an actual distribution grid in northern Germany with a high share of PV and wind energy are calculated

On the Impact of Measurement Errors on Loss Calculations in Distribution Grids

“…do not yet use this); (2) to study the impact of averaging over 15min intervals as commonly done by many Smart Meters (and also smart inverters); this averaging may also introduce a time alignment error due to non-ideal clocks, see [10] for initial analysis of the latter; (3) to investigate the behavior of the calculated loss values for scenarios of missing measurements, e.g. customers without Smart Meters; (4) to investigate the impact of 3-phase unbalanced grids on the confidence interval calculation for losses; (5) to investigate the case when the phase-angle in Eq. ( 2) is a measurement that is subject to measurement errors; (6) To use the obtained confidence intervals in approaches for theft or fault detection and to investigate what improvement can be obtained from the quantification of the accuracy of the loss time series.…”

“…[4] points out that in practice missing data makes it difficult to break down the losses into technical and non-technical losses. Simulation experiments of real grid topologies from Northern Germany and France in [5] show strong differences of the contribution of the share of losses from the LV grid (42% of the losses in Northern Germany are on LV grid level, while in France only 14%), arguing that detailed LV grid loss analysis is highly relevant. The need for simple engineering rules (not requiring detailed grid simulations) for loss calculation has been pointed out and addressed in [6].…”