Stochastic assessment of voltage dips for a PQ oriented distribution system development

Voltage dips are one of the major power quality concerns that customers and distributors have to face, due to the continuously growing integration of high sensitive loads claiming for a distribution service tailored to the digital era. As well known, voltage dips are strongly dependent on network topology and the search for the optimal network design is highly dependent on power quality constraints. For these reasons in the paper an optimization algorithm that for a given network topology is able to find the most convenient actions to make it possible that some power quality' constraints are complied with is proposed. Such algorithm has been also implemented in a heuristic procedure for the optimal distribution planning so that the search of the optimal network expansion in a given period may be explicitly leaded by power quality. Real world applications complete the paper showing the impact of voltage dips in distribution planning