Technical and economic impacts of active management on distribution network

With the deregulation of energy market and the appeal for environment protection, more and more distributed generation (DG) is embedded in the distribution network. However the approach of connecting DG in most cases is based on a so-called fit and forget policy and the capacity of DG is limited rigidly by distribution network operator (DNO) to avoid the negative effects of high level penetration. Therefore active management (AM) is put forward as an effective method to network reinforcement for the connection and operation of DG. In this paper, the concept and principle of AM are introduced, and several indices are proposed to evaluate both technical and economic impacts of AM on distribution network with DG. To simplify the simulation fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) algorithm is introduced. The test results on a sample system represent that AM will lead to decrease of power generation of DG, but it can reduce energy losses and improve voltage profile effectively. Furthermore, AM will take great economic incentives to DG developer as well as DNO with reasonable policy. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.