Concurrent placement of distributed generation resources and capacitor banks in distribution systems

In this paper, a new approach for placement of both Distributed Generation (DG) units and capacitor banks in distribution systems is proposed. The goal is to 1) reduce the total real and reactive power losses, 2) improve the voltage profile, and 3) improve the power factor for the total demand. The method uses a bus-ranking scheme based on a weighted sum of indices representative of the impacts that a DG unit or capacitor bank would have in terms of the three aforementioned objectives. Moreover, the introduced indices provide a quantitative measure to identify whether placing a DG unit or a capacitor bank is more beneficial at each bus. In order to assess the performance of the proposed method, a 49-bus distribution system is introduced. The method is applied on the test system and best locations for allocation of DG units and capacitor banks on each branch are identified. Besides, a comparison between the performance of DG units and capacitor banks at each bus is noted. At the end, by examining the resulting real and reactive power losses, voltage profile and power factor, it is demonstrated that the proposed method successfully accomplishes its objectives.