SAIDI Constrained Economic Planning and Utilization of Central Storage in Rural Distribution Networks

This paper forms a framework for allocating a central electric energy storage (EES) in discrete communities, forming as segmentations along the rural feeders, where the installation of cross connects are not economic or even feasible. In this framework, EESs that centrally can be installed in each community are owned and operated by an aggregator/retailer, trading bidirectional energy transactions with both the grid and the customers. The objective is to find optimum investment in storage capacity in rural feeders for minimum annual energy purchase cost using energy arbitrage opportunities, while maintaining an allowable level of system average interruption duration index (SAIDI). As a part of EES sizing and siting optimization in this approach, annual hourly network data are utilized for charge/discharge scheduling and constraint, and for system reliability assessment—using the k-means clustering technique. This method is applied to a rural network in Queensland, Australia, and the results are examined to show the effectiveness of this method.