A Novel Technique for Optimal siting and Rating of Shunt Capacitors Placed to the Radial Distribution Systems

Abstract

The overall efficacy of power distribution is reduced through power loss in distribution systems ow- ing to branch resistance. For providing quality power to customers, power losses must be diminished, and volt- ages must be enhanced. This paper introduces a novel improvement for the traditional Salps Swarm Algo- rithm (SSA) called Enhance SSA (ESSA) for selecting Optimal Shunt Capacitor Ratings and their Locations (OSCRL). ESSA is viewed as an enhanced version of SSA with the aim of improving the SSA’s poor per- formance. A multi-objective function was designed in this work for reducing real power loss and Total Sys- tem Cost (TSC), as well as, improving feeder voltage profile and maximizing Net Savings (NSs) per year un- der security restrictions. For validating and evaluat- ing the proposed ESSA technique, a practical 33-bus lo- cal Iraqi and standard IEEE 69-bus Radial Distribution Systems (RDSs) were used as test systems through uti- lizing MATLAB. The experimental results attained by the proposed ESSA are compared with other approaches currently available in the literature for addressing OS- CRL problem. The experimental results prove the ef- ficacy and supremacy of the ESSA to other literature algorithms with respect to diminishing power loss as well as TSC, reinforce bus voltage profile and increase NSs per year for multiple RDSs.