Optimal Placement of Intermittent Renewable Energy Resources and Energy Storage System in Smart Power Distribution Networks

This paper presents an efficient strategy to optimally allocate renewable energy sources (RES), primarily wind and solar photovoltaic (PV), and energy storage system (ESS) in electrical distribution networks with a goal of minimizing costs and active power losses. The proposed planning strategy is used to determine the number of possible and optimal locations for the hybrid RES–ESS system. This paper further presents a control scheme to optimally dispatch the output of ESS, which increases the effective utilization of RES by reducing their day-ahead forecast errors in order to minimize the deviation between forecasted and actual values. In our proposed strategy, the location that produces the least overall power losses complying with the system constraints is considered as the optimal one. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, this paper considers a case study of a 16-bus test system that comprises of several loads, wind farm, PV, and ESS. The test results demonstrate that by determining the optimal bus location for the RES–ESS system, overall power losses as well as peak load can be significantly reduced.