A measurement-based approach to voltage-constrained hosting capacity analysis with controllable reactive power behind-the-meter

We propose an efficient method for the assessment of localized voltage-constrained distributed generation hosting capacity given an engineer’s choice or estimate of a power factor control setpoint for each customer. The advantage of the proposed method is that it extends recent methods to perform HCA using only advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) measurements with no prior knowledge of the network or its topology. This is achieved by developing efficient decision-making algorithms based on linear algebra and optimization techniques. The performance of the method is benchmarked against conventional model-based hosting capacity analysis (HCA) techniques, and we demonstrate the success of the method on several real-world AMI datasets. We find that comparable performance is achieved to model-based methods. Calculating HC from AMI datasets has the potential to avoid modeling errors common in circuit models. •A method to assess localized hosting capacity without the network model is developed.•The method requires measurements of the voltage magnitudes and net power demands.•Reactive power control parameters are incorporated to improve physical realism.•The reactive power control parameters can be chosen or estimated.