Planning and real-time management of smart grids with high PV penetration in Italy

For planning and development and in real-time operation of smart grids, it is important to evaluate the impacts of photovoltaic (PV) distributed generation. This paper presents an integrated platform, constituted of two main components: a PV simulator and a real-time distribution network simulator. The first, designed and developed following the microservice approach and providing Representational State Transfer web services, simulates real-sky solar radiation on rooftops and estimates the PV energy production. The second, based on a digital real-time power systems simulator, simulates the behaviour of the electricity network under the simulated generation scenarios. The platform is tested on a case study based on real data for a district of the city of Turin, Italy. In the results, the authors show possible applications of the platform for power flow forecasting during real-time operation and for detecting possible voltage and transformers’ capacity problems during planning due to high penetration of renewable energy sources. In particular, the results show that the case study distribution network, in the actual configuration, is not ready to accommodate all the generation capacity that can be installed, as, in certain hours of the day and on certain days of the year, the capacity of some transformers is exceeded.