Unlocking thermal and ampacity headroom of medium-voltage cables: towards a component-aware distribution planning framework

Large-scale integration of renewable energy sources (RES) such as wind and photovoltaic (PV) generation at the medium-voltage (MV) level is causing severe congestion in distribution networks, limiting hosting capacity, and leading to growing connection waiting lists. In network practice, cable loading is still assessed using conservative static cable ratings, which overlook the available thermal headroom of assets and may lead to premature grid reinforcement, and do not sufficiently address the implications of higher utilisation for asset reliability and degradation.