A techno-economic comparison of traditional upgrades, volt-var controls, and coordinated distributed energy resource management systems for integration of distributed photovoltaic resources

•Cost and performance of three options for expanding PV hosting capacity are compared.•Volt-var controls avoid upfront costs but do not expand the hosting capacity as much.•DERMS results in the largest hosting capacity increase.•PV curtailment is higher with DERMS than volt-var control.