Impact of Integrating Small Scale Wind Systems in the Secondary Distribution Network - Case Study for Mauritius

With the new designs of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines, producing electrical energy from wind has never been so promising at small scale. The connection of any distributed generation unit has its benefits as well as its drawbacks; which are more pronounced with increasing penetration level of these units. As such, fundamental network parameters are altered which are likely to affect performance characteristics like voltage, network losses, fault level and harmonics. In this paper, these impacts are studied for a typical residential area in Mauritius which was modelled in detail in DIgSILENT Power Factory®. With increasing penetration level and different sizes of DG used, the response of the network was observed such as to establish the hosting capacity of this network so as to maintain a safe and reliable operation.