Optimal Placing and Sizing of Distributed Generation Units in Radial Distribution Networks

Abstract

In today’s world, the lion’s share of electricity demand is met by thermal power plants globally. Thermal power plants, mainly coal fired and, in some cases, gas fired come with some major issues. The first and foremost issue is, fossil fuels come with limited stockpile. Extensive usage of coal is leading to rapid declination of the stock. The second major problem is the massive amount of pollution caused by burning the fossil fuels especially coal. The third issue is these plants generate electricity in a centralized fashion, dispatching the energy to distant areas leads to losses in transmission and distribution. The concept of Distributed Generation is capable of dealing with all three aforementioned major issues. By implementing Distributed Generation (DG)s, small scale decentralized generation of electricity is possible by installing small sized renewable energy sources like solar panels, small wind turbines, biomass plants or non-polluting non-renewable sources such as small seized gas turbines directly to the low voltage side of the distribution system.

In this research, the attempt has been made to find the optimal locations to place single DG units as well as multiple DG units having optimal size of each DG unit so that the system loss becomes minimized using a fairly new optimization algorithm. The outcomes show effectiveness of the proposed method and the results have been compared to recent works of similar fashion.