PLACEMENT OF DISTRIBUTED GENERATION IN A RURAL DISTRIBUTION NETWORK OF DOLAKHA DISTRICT NEPAL

Abstract

The population in the world is increasing day by day due to which the energy demand is also in increasing trend. For the fulfillment of this growing demand, there is a need of an efficient energy generation system along with increased generation. The distributed generation may be one of the solutions for this increasing trend of demand. A distributed generation is a small generation unit with capacities varying from a few kW to 10’s of MW. A renewable energy-based distributed generation becomes extremely attractive due to their significant ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decrease the dependency on fossil fuels in addition to power generation utilities to fulfill the increasing demand of power at the customer’s site with minimum transmission and distribution losses. One of the least developed countries, Nepal, where the electricity supply system is still unreliable and of poor quality, while there has a lot of potential for electricity generation in the country, but still, electricity is imported from India to meet the load demand. More than 75% of the population living in rural areas and the power losses in the rural electricity supply system is very high due to the very sparse load in a wide range of area. This may cause a higher voltage drop and poor voltage profile in the distribution networks. While the areas having abundant renewable energy resources and the demand is very low. The distributed generation which generates electricity at the distribution level near to the load/demand may rectify these issues. The main objective of this dissertation work is to find the optimal location and size of DG units in a rural radial distribution network of Dolakha district, Nepal. Optimal size and bus location for the placement of DG is based on system power loss minimization and voltage profile improvement approach. Determining the optimal DG locations and the sizes in a real-time scenario is quite hard because of the various system constraints. The proposed site having the potential for power generation from some renewable energy resources. In this study, the backward/forward sweep method has been used for load flow analysis, voltage-sensitive analysis has been done for defining the optimal bus location and genetic algorithm (GA) has been used for determining the optimal size of DG sources in the distribution network. The real-time demand data has been used for the calculation of energy losses before and after optimization.