A new algorithm for impacts of multiple DGs and D-STATCOM in unbalanced radial distribution networks

Abstract

A major research is going on distributed generation (DG) which utilise renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, fuel cells, etc., for electric power generation. As the renewable energy sources are geographically widely spread and of low capacity, they can be connected to distribution networks. This paper proposes a three-phase power flow algorithm (PFA) for unbalanced radial distribution networks (URDN) with multiple installations of DGs and distribution static synchronous compensator (D-STATCOM). The proposed PFA utilised the special topology of radial distribution networks (RDN) to divide the network into different sections. The bus numbers and branch numbers of these sections are stored in row entries of BUS_NUM and BRANCH_NUM matrices, respectively. These matrices make the implementation of PFA simple. The accuracy of the three-phase PFA without the integration of DGs and D-STATCOM is tested on IEEE-13 bus URDN and the results are found to be very accurate with the literature. Several case studies are carried on IEEE-13 bus URDN with integration of DGs and D-STATCOM. The test results show that the proposed PFA can effectively handle different DG modelling and D-STATCOM and overall energy saving, reduced power loss and improved voltage profile are achieved with these integrations.