  The limited capacity of distribution grids for hosting renewable generation
is one of the main challenges towards the energy transition. Local energy
markets, enabling direct exchange of energy between prosumers, help to
integrate the growing number of residential photovoltaic panels by scheduling
flexible demand for balancing renewable energy locally. Nevertheless, existing
scheduling mechanisms do not take into account the phases to which households
are connected, increasing network unbalance and favoring bigger voltage
rises/drops and higher losses. In this paper, we reduce network unbalance by
leveraging market transactions information to dynamically allocate houses to
phases using solid state switches. We propose cost effective mechanisms for the
selection of households to switch and for their optimal allocation to phases.
Using load flow analysis we show that only 6% of houses in our case studies
need to be equipped with dynamic switches to counteract the negative impact of
local energy markets while maintaining all the benefits. Combining local energy
markets and dynamic phase switching we improve both overall load balancing and
network unbalance, effectively augmenting DER hosting capacity of distribution
grids.
