Probabilistic assessment of renewable hosting capacity under dynamic line rating in medium-voltage distribution networks

This paper presents a probabilistic framework to assess how dynamic line rating affects renewable hosting capacity in medium-voltage distribution networks under correlated meteorological uncertainty. The method combines a copula-based weather model, probabilistic power flow, conductor thermal modelling, and risk-constrained distributed energy resource planning in a unified workflow. The framework is applied to the CIGRE medium-voltage benchmark under the climate conditions of Zaragoza. Dynamic line rating removes the thermal risk observed on Feeder 2 under static thermal rating. At a one-percent annual-average thermal-violation fraction, it increases the risk-constrained hosting capacity from 9.36 MW to 27.48 MW. The full-network analysis shows that this recovered thermal margin must still be checked against voltage limits. A conservative optimiser-side guard band is used to enforce a five-percent limit on overvoltage above 1.05 per unit. This reduces the maximum reported distributed energy resource portfolio capacity from 34.3 MW to 21.25 MW, including 1.56 MW of fixed background distributed generation. Thus, dynamic line rating can greatly increase hosting capacity, but the binding constraint shifts from thermal loading to voltage at high distributed energy resource penetration.