Proper planning of the installation of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) in distribution networks is needed to maximize the overall technical and economic benefits. The limited lifetime and relatively high cost of BESSs require appropriate decisions on their installation and deployment, in order to make the best investment. This paper proposes a comprehensive method to fully support the BESS location and sizing in a low-voltage (LV) network, taking into account the characteristics of the local generation and demand connected at the network nodes, and the time-variable generation and demand patterns. The proposed procedure aims to improve the overall network conditions, by considering both technical and economic aspects. An original approach is presented to consider both the planning and scheduling of BESSs in an LV system. This approach combines the properties of metaheuristics for BESS sizing and placement with a greedy algorithm to find viable BESS scheduling in a relatively short time considering a specified time horizon, and the application of decision theory concepts to obtain the final solution. The decision theory considers various scenarios with variable energy prices, the diffusion of local renewable generation, evolution of the local demand with the integration of electric vehicles, and a number of planning alternatives selected as the solutions with top-ranked objective functions of the operational schedules in the given scenarios. The proposed approach can be applied to energy communities where the local system operator only manages the portion of the electrical grid of the community and is responsible for providing secure and affordable electricity to its consumers.
417Regarding the calculation of the load profiles, it takes into account the real contractual delivery 418 powers to each load. Two nodes are considered as commercial consumers, while the other ones 419 refer to residential customers. For the profiles, due to lack of complete information from the actual 420 profiles, relevant (residential and commercial) profiles have been taken from an open-source 421 dataset (OpenEI) [36], normalized and multiplied by the nominal powers.422 3.2.2 PV generation 423 The considered PV production, in the simulation, is calculated based on yearly solar irradiance 424 and the nominal installed power [37]. Yearly solar irradiance data is obtained through collected 425 data from third party weather service provider [38] for specific location of study case with the 426 coordination of 46.4746° N, 11.2479° E.427 3.2.3 EVs relevant information 428 EVs are considered in some scenarios, through the load profile caused by their charging.
429Within this analysis, the number of EVs that determines the EV charging profile, is set to 10 in the 430 beginning of the scenarios with EV and that number increments gradually by rate of one EV per 431year. The nominal power of the EV chargers are considered to be 3.6 kW, i.e., a standard power 432 level of charging stations, and charging events occur mainly during the night...