Application of battery storage to switching predictive control of power distribution systems including road heating

In regions with heavy snowfall, the living environment is becoming a serious problem due to heavy snow accumulation. A Road heating is an electrical device which promotes snow melting by burying a heating cable as a thermal source underground in such regions. When integrating the road heating into power distribution systems, we need to optimize the flow of electric power by appropriately integrating distributed power sources and conventional power distribution equipment. In this paper, we introduce a battery storage to the power distribution system including road heating, and extend the predictive switching control of the systems due to the authors' previous study to the case where battery storage is installed. As a main result, we propose a predictive switching control that utilizes photovoltaic (PV) power generation and surplus power stored in the battery storage effectively, and achieves the reduction of distribution loss, attenuation of voltage fluctuation, and efficient snow melting, simultaneously. We verify the effectiveness of the application of battery storage through numerical simulation using actual time series data of weather conditions and active power of the PV power generation and load.