Reliability and economic‐driven switchable capacitor placement in distribution network

Abstract

In this study, reliability and economic-driven capacitor allocation problem in electrical distribution system is investigated for a definite planning horizon considering several technical and economic aspects. Also, the system reliability modelling is performed based on a new approach, which is considering values of reactive component of currents flowing through branches of the feeder and applying different feeder's failure rate models. The aim of this study is minimising total cost of the system including system power loss cost, system risk cost, investment cost and maintenance cost. Herein, in order to achieve practical outcomes, inflation and interest rates as the economic factors considered in the planning, and yearly load growth, hourly and daily varying load, and customers’ load types are applied in the modelling, and also load model-based power flow is run rather than simple power flow. In this study, it is demonstrated that considering unreal model for the system load types or ignoring dependence of system reliability on the reactive component of current can significantly affect the results of the capacitor placement problem and also it can impose extra cost to the local distribution company.