Power flow management for the DSO: advanced techniques for managing voltage and current in distribution networks

The evolution of the role of DSOs often requires strategic changes from historical monitoring and control approaches. In order to accommodate for the rapidly increasing number of distributed energy resources (DERs), the growing number of planned worksites as well as more interactions with TSOs while meeting regulatory and quality standards, DSOs must adapt their decision support tools. This work presents a first milestone in the ambition of designing and implementing a decision support tool based on optimisation techniques for DSOs and power flow management. We propose an advanced optimization model designed to manage electrical constraints on voltage and current across various time horizons and geographical scales, by providing an optimal set of levers to activate. In our work, levers follow real DSO rules and are of different types (flexibility, active power limitations, network/feeder reconfiguration). A critical aspect of this work has been the close collaboration with network operators to build upon their experience and data. This direct engagement has been instrumental in identifying and understanding the numerous implicit industrial rules and operational best-practices that influence network management. The model provides operators with actionable insights and recommendations for managing network constraints more effectively thanks to black-box optimization and local search algorithms.