Utilizing Flexibility Services from a Large Heat Pump to Postpone Grid Reinforcement

Distribution grid reinforcement problem is considered in this paper. Annual growth of the electric loads may lead to the congestion situations in the distribution network, where current flowing through components exceed their maximum current carrying capacity (MCCC). A conventional solution is to reinforce overloaded components, i.e. to replace it with the one with higher capacity. However, this will lead to the additional investments for the distribution system operator (DSO). An alternative solution is to utilize flexibility services (FS) such as reconfiguration (RE) and demand response (DR) to provide peak reduction from the large controllable loads (e.g. a heat pump) in the system. Several forecasts of the future load growth simulated in the MATPOWER are used to study the proposed solutions and identify their feasibility. The results show that both FS can be used to defer grid reinforcement providing economic benefits for the DSO.