Influence of Distributed Energy Resources on the performance of phase topology identification in distribution networks

The increase of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in low-voltage distribution networks (LVDN) requires accurate phase topology information of single-phase users. However, this information is not always available or, when it is, is often unreliable. Although there are methods in the literature for the automatic phase topology identification in LVDN, the influence of DERs on their performance has not been widely studied. In this paper, an evaluation of the influence of DERs in phase topology identification is presented. Five DER penetration scenarios (0%, 5%, 10%, 20% and 40%) over a LVDN with 459 users were used. A total of three state-of-the-art methods from the literature were tested. All of them showed an accuracy decrease when DER penetration increases. However, the one proposed by the authors showed the smallest decrease (from 100% without DER to 95.87% with 40% DER penetration) compared to the others, which showed a greater influence (from 99.76% to 89.81% and from 97.77% to 52.67% respectively). Copyright (C) 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)