As a power electronic device, Soft Open Point (SOP) offers increasingly valuable flexible and accurate power flow control for electricity distribution networks. In this paper, SOPs are optimized to minimize energy curtailment of distributed generation. The optimal operating set-points of SOPs are determined by using a multi-period non-linear optimization model. The optimization model adopts minimum energy curtailment of distributed generation as the objective, while considering the constraints of power losses and physical limits of SOPs and power output limits of distributed generation simultaneously. At the input of the model, load variation is considered by generating random power loading conditions via Monte Carlo simulation. As such, the results of minimum energy curtailment of the model can be analyzed statistically. The methodology is demonstrated on a modified IEEE 33-bus system with different SOP cases. The performance of SOP is evaluated comparing to the case without SOP, and the results show that an SOP can effectively reduce minimum energy curtailment by 84% on average. The impacts of location, capacity and number of SOPs on the performance are also analyzed respectively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.