OPTIMAL SIZING AND PLACEMENT OF CAPACITOR AND DISTRIBUTED GENERATION FOR LOSS MINIMIZATION IN UNBALANCED DISTRIBUTION NETWORK

Abstract

Power loss reduction is an important problem that needs to be addressed as generating electrical power. It is important to reduce power loss using locally generated power sources and/or compensations. This thesis presents a method of maximizing energy utilization, feeder loss reduction and voltage profile improvement for radial distribution network using the active and reactive power sources. Distributed Generation (DG) (wind and solar with backup by biomass generation) and shunt capacitor (QG) for reactive power demand are used. Integrating DG and QG at each bus might reduce the loss but it is economically unaffordable for developing countries like Ethiopia. Therefore, this work utilized an optimization method namely Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) for finding an optimal size and location at feeder for placing QG and DG, so that the feeder loss is minimized. WOA is a meta-heuristic optimization derived from natural food hunting behavior of biggest mammal fish called whale. To see the performance WOA, it is compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO). In the process of optimization, the feeder carrying capacity is considered as the primary constraint to get the best minimum loss while voltage, position limits and the sum of equality constraints are kept considered. The performance of the applied method is performed on 35 and 40 bus feeders of Bahir Dar distribution network. From the results, the power loss had reduced from 339.5703 kW to 22 kW in Ghion feeder and from 126.2149 kW to 22.4 kW in Bata feeder using WOA. It also had reduced from 339.5703 kW to 27 kW in Ghion and from 126.2149 kW to 51.3 kW in Bata feeder using PSO. Hence, it can be noted that that WOA is superior to PSO in terms of loss minimization