Impact of reconfiguration period and photovoltaic penetration on distribution grid reconfiguration

The reduction of power loss is considered as the goal for grid reconfiguration to improve distribution grid efficiency. The challenge in reconfiguring a grid in the present day context is the time-variability of load and distributed generation penetration. This paper looks at period of reconfiguration and its impact on network losses in the context of time-varying load. Though reconfiguring a network reduces the losses, this paper calls for a comparison of number of switching vs. the loss reduction in order to decide the period of reconfiguration. This paper considers also the impact of varying photovoltaic (PV) penetration on the resulting optimal configuration. It validates the method of using a parameter namely minimum loss reduction parameter to avoid tedious computational efforts in finding the optimal configuration when an infinitesimal change in PV penetration occurs.