Distribution system expansion planning incorporating storage units in the presence of wind-based distributed generation

Abstract

Distribution system expansion planning (DSEP) is an important task of electric distribution companies in order to appropriately supply their customers load with the minimum cost. The emergence of distributed generation (DG) in distribution networks has affected the planning and operation problems of these networks. The wind-based DGs are increasingly employed in distribution systems due to their inexhaustible and non-polluting features. However, the intermittent nature of the wind speed has made the output power of these resources also intermittent and stochastic. To settle this defect, the energy storage units can be employed. In this paper, an approach has been developed to incorporate the wind-based DGs along with energy storage units in the DSEP problem. Such a study has not been implemented by the previous researches. The proposed DSEP and its constraints have been formulated as an optimization problem where an efficient genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to solve it. The conducted approach has been tested on the 21-bus network in different experiments to evaluate its performance. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.