Accommodating High PV Penetration on Distribution Feeders

This paper investigates the operation and protection issues on distribution systems with high penetration of residential PV systems. Residential PV systems represent small scale resources and therefore they have different impacts on a distribution circuit than larger scale resources. The paper considers a typical residential distribution system and shows that determining the fault current profile and voltage variations on such systems becomes more challenging. However, the impacts on system protection and voltage variation are not severe on such systems, and thus, high level penetration can be accommodated provided that proper revisions are made to the protection and voltage control schemes.