Impact of service and feeder cable upgrade on hosting capacity for single phase connected photovoltaics

The addition of photovoltaics (PV) to a grid impacts the performance of that grid in a number of ways. These impacts limit how much PV can be connected, termed ‘hosting capacity (HC)’. The impacts include overvoltage and overloading. Mitigation of impacts can be achieved in different ways: in this paper, upgrade of service cable and feeder cable has been considered, one of the classical solutions. Cable size upgrades to 16, 25 and 35 mm 2 from 10 mm 2 have been studied to mitigate overvoltages in a 28-customer Swedish suburban grid. A stochastic planning-based approach has been used to obtain a performance parameter that can be used to compare the mitigation methods. The results showed an improvement in overvoltage and hosting capacity with cable upgrade. The hosting capacity is also shown to be sensitive to the risk chosen and to the PV size.