Building and Validating a Large-Scale Combined Transmission & Distribution Synthetic Electricity System of Texas: Article No. 110037

Distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar, have rapidly expanded in recent years, given declining costs and the desire to reduce carbon emissions. With more energy resources located in the lower-voltage distribution system, it is increasingly helpful to utilize combined transmission and distribution (T&D) system models to analyze interactions between these normally-distinct subsystems. This paper describes a methodology for creating very large-scale, highly detailed, combined T&D systems that are synthetic - that is, free from non-public data - yet still realistic. The paper describes the methodology used to construct the test systems, demonstrated on a T&D system geolocated in Texas, and presents benchmark co-simulation results. Validation demonstrates that the resulting syn-texas-TDgrid synthetic test system realistically represents characteristics found in actual networks. With over 15,000 feeders and 46 million electrical nodes, this T&D dataset has applications for research in optimal power flow algorithms, voltage control, reconfiguration, T&D coordination schemes under high adoption of distributed energy resources, etc.