OPTIMAL CAPACITOR PLACEMENT IN ACTUAL CONFIGURATION AND OPERATIONAL CONDITIONS OF DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS USING RCGA

Rahmat-Allah Hooshmand - Mohammad Ataei

   One of the most important methods in loss reduction and controlling the voltages of distribution systems is the utilization of the fixed and switched capacitors. To do this, real modelling of the system in actual operational conditions including unbalanced or balanced loading and for actual feeder structure, ie, radial/meshed configuration, are required. In this paper, a new technique for finding the optimal values of the fixed and switched capacitors in the distribution networks with above properties based on the real coded genetic algorithm (RCGA) is presented. For this purpose, the modelling of the loads at different load levels are simulated with low voltage and medium voltage capacitors that are available on the market. Regarding the above factors in addition to the various parameters in the optimization problem, RCGA is used to find the best and real optimal network with the best rate for the capacitors. Finally, this methodology is tested on a region of the distribution network of the city of Ahvaz in Iran and satisfactory results are obtained. These results show that in addition to the decreasing of the network losses and improvement of the voltage profile, the benefit saving due to application of capacitors is increased.

Keywords: unbalanced distribution networks, optimization, genetic algorithm, capacitor placement

[full-paper]