POWER LOSS MINIMIZATION AND VOLTAGE PROFILE IMPROVEMENT ON AN ELECTRICAL POWER DISTRIBUTION NETWORK USING OPTIMALLY PLACED PHOTOVOLTAIC ENERGY SOURCE

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent times the adoption of distribution generation in power system has been on the increase due to the progress recorded in exploiting renewable energy resources for electrical power generation at distribution level and the necessity for enhanced power quality. However, inappropriate placement of these resources could result in increased power loss and poor voltage profile. Therefore, this study assessed the effect of optimally placed photovoltaic energy source (PVES) on power loss and voltage profile of an electrical power distribution network (DN). Power flow analysis was performed on standard IEEE 33-bus and Ilesa 33-bus DNs without and with inclusion of PVES using forward and backward sweep method. The optimum location and the corresponding PVES size were determined using both sensitivity analysis (SA) and whale optimisation algorithm (WOA). The simulations were carried out in MATLAB R2023a software environment. The performance of WOA on standard IEEE 33-bus DN was validated in comparison with the results obtained using grey wolf optimization (GWO), adaptive shuffle frogs leaping algorithm (ASFLA) and one rank cuckoo search algorithm (ORCSA). The power flow results of IEEE 33-bus DN without PVES showed that buses 5, 11 and 23 with voltage magnitudes of 0.9303, 1.0558 and 1.0571 p.u., respectively violated the statutory voltage limit of 0.95 to 1.05 p.u. Buses 5, 14, 19 and 31 of Ilesa 33-bus DN with voltage magnitudes of 1.0558, 0.9237, 0.9312 and 1.0542 p.u., respectively also violated the statutory limit. The total active power loss (TAPL) for IEEE 33-bus and Ilesa 33-bus DNs without PVES were 195.51 MW and 247.29 kW, respectively. The optimal locations of PVES unit for the IEEE 33-bus DN with SA were buses 10, 27, 28 and 29 with sizes 6.55, 10.00, 8.55 and 5.25 MW, respectively while with WOA were buses 4, 5 and 27 with sizes 8.5, 5.5 and 5.25 MW, respectively. Similarly, the optimal locations of PVES for Ilesa 33-bus DN with SA were buses 5, 14, 20, 27 with sizes 10.0, 12.5, 10.5, 15.0 and 10.0 kW, respectively whereas with WOA were buses 4, 8 and 17 with sizes of 12.50, 10.50 and 10.00 kW, respectively. The voltage profiles of both networks considered appreciably improved and fell within the statutory limit with both unoptimised PVES and optimised PVES installed. The TAPL of the IEEE 33-bus DN with unoptimised PVES, PVES optimised with SA and PVES optimised with WOA were 164.71, 163.30 and 153.30 MW, respectively while the value for the Ilesa 33-bus DN were 235.61, 243.51 and 201.97 kW, respectively. The percentage of TAPL on the IEEE 33-bus system with WOA, GWO, ASFLA and ORCSA were 21.6, 10.7, 20.2 and 21.2%, respectively; indicating WOA outperformed the other optimisation approaches for the placement of PVES unit. This study achieved a minimised total active power loss and an enhanced voltage profile on IEEE 33-bus and Ilesa 33-bus distribution networks with the application of appropriate optimisation technique for the photovoltaic energy source placement.