A Practical Way to Balance Single Phase Loads in a Three Phase System at Distribution and Unit Level

Abstract

The crucial worry in the production of electricity is to be certain that the supplied electricity meets international standards. The growing environmental alerts and the advancement in technology led to the integration of eco-friendly energy sources such as photovoltaic cells and wind turbines to local power grids. Although they provide additional power, the hazardous distribution of these sources in the grid does not benefit power quality measures. This, in addition to the un-linearity in consumption curves, make load balancing at distribution level a must to apply. To achieve the sought balance, load reconfiguration is the solution to be applied. This paper focuses on a practical way that rearranges the loads over the three phases at the unit itself. These changes guarantee electric bills drop and environmental benefits that result from fuel consumption reduction. Practical balancing (PB) is a switching mechanism that guarantees the loads are balanced according to constraints. The main difference between PB and previously proposed techniques such as the Phase commitment (PC) algorithm, The Heuristic (HE) method and the Modified Leap Frog optimization technique is that PB is implementable on real device while others are not. Using the practical balancing algorithm, the percentage of unbalance dropped to 0.38% and 0.43% for the same 15 and 150 loads testing systems used for the phase commitment algorithm. In addition, the average unbalance dropped to 1.6 A and 1.26 A, respectively and the neutral current dropped to 2.08 A and 1.9 A, respectively. The study was conducted on real data for different types of loads.