Achieving the UN’s sustainable energy targets through dynamic operating limits

Despite the world’s relentless efforts to achieve the United Nations’ sustainable energy target by 2030, the current pace of progress is insufficient to reach the objective. Continuous support and development across various domains of the energy sector are required to achieve sustainability targets. This article focuses on the potential of dynamic operating limits to drive the world’s sustainability efforts, specifically in addressing critical challenges of distribution networks of the power system by progressively setting the nodal limits on the active and reactive power injection into the distribution network based on data-driven computer simulation. While the importance of dynamic operating limits has recently been recognized, its crucial role in the residential energy sustainability sector, which requires a significant push to provide universal energy access by 2030, has not been adequately investigated. This perspective explains the fundamental concepts and benefits of dynamic operating limits in encouraging the adoption of distributed renewable energy resources in the residential sector to support the United Nation’s sustainable energy objective. Additionally, we discuss the limitations of computing this limit and applying it to the electricity network and some motivational models that can encourage electricity customers to come forward to address the challenges. Finally, we explore new research and implementation prospects for designing comprehensive, dependable, accountable, and complementary dynamic operating limit programs to accelerate the attainment of sustainable energy targets.