Outage Management in Active Distribution Network with Distributed Energy Resources

The occurrence of extreme events may cause outages in the network, affecting loads that are crucial for the functioning of human life. Existing distributed energy resources can be utilized to provide reliable supply to critical loads by forming self-sustained islands within the network. Island partitioning as a restoration strategy is proposed in this paper. A graph theory-based island partitioning scheme and optimal load shedding are modeled for this purpose. Following the repair of failed components, the nodes in the islands need to reconnect to the main operating network. An optimal multi-step reconnection approach is developed for the distribution network to revert to its normal operating state and topology. The proposed framework is evaluated on a modified IEEE 37 node distribution test feeder for two outage scenarios. Results indicate that the island partitioning is an effective restoration scheme, and the multi-step reconnection schedule is dependent on the outage scenario.