Impact of a High Penetration of Microgeneration and μGrids in the Security of Supply

Abstract

The recent development of the concept of microgrid, associated to the emergent interest in microgeneration, raised a number of challenges regarding the evaluation of the technical, economical and regulatory impacts of a high penetration of this kind of solutions in the power systems. In this paper, the topic of security of supply is addressed, aiming at evaluating the influence of microgeneration and microgrids in the medium and long term availability of generation to serve the forecasted load. A Monte-Carlo based methodology is used, to compare the adequacy indices of a base case without microgeneration with the indices associated to various penetrations of different technologies of microgeneration (CHP, PV, wind, etc) and the existence of μGrids.