Reliability Studies of Modern Distribution Systems Integrated With Renewable Generation and Parking Lots

This paper investigates the role of parking lots in improving the reliability of renewable-based distribution systems, through provision of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) programs during outage events. In this regard, municipal parking decks are viewed as distributed energy storage systems and the amount of available energy from these units in random contingency events is probabilistically modeled for reliability studies. Appropriate stochastic models are also introduced to capture the volatility and intermittency of renewable sources. Moreover, it is discussed that how the adopted outage management scheme (OMS) in contingency events can affect the reliability level of customers. In response, several OMSs on the basis of bankruptcy problem are proposed to fairly distribute the available resources among different microgrids/sections, once a failure occurs in the system. Subsequently, a general framework based on the non-sequential Monte Carlo simulation method is developed to evaluate different customers and system reliability indices in presence of emergency V2G programs. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through implementation on a test system and several case studies are presented. The results suggest that realization of V2G programs offered by EV parking lots, accompanied by an appropriate OMS, can significantly enhance the reliability of supply in modern distribution networks.