Load Areas in Reconfiguration of Distribution Systems

With the moving of distribution systems towards a renewed architecture, new monitoring and control functionalities have emerged; with them a large amount of information need to be treated. Not all this information is strictly necessary; a relevant part of it can be simplified by the concept of Load Area: a group of prosumers whose power injection has a similar impact on the distribution grid operating conditions. The Load Areas allow to select the relevant data for both monitoring and control functionalities of distribution systems, and to describe the relationships between such data in a compact representation. In this paper, the concept of LA is examined when multiple configurations of the network have to be considered, so as to examine the changing of LAs when the grid is reconfigured. Two test cases are evaluated; the results show that even in case of reconfiguration of the network, the number of LAs to be considered remains limited, allowing a relevant reduction in the information required to represent the network.