The penetration of renewable distributed generations (RDGs) such as wind and solar energy into conventional power systems provides many technical and environmental benefits. These benefits include enhancing power system reliability, providing a clean solution to rapidly increasing load demands, reducing power losses, and improving the voltage profile. However, installing these distributed generation (DG) units can cause negative effects if their size and location are not properly determined. Therefore, the optimal location and size of these distributed generations may be obtained to avoid these negative effects. Several conventional and artificial algorithms have been used to find the location and size of RDGs in power systems. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the most important and widely used techniques. In this paper, a new variant of particle swarm algorithm with nonlinear time varying acceleration coefficients (PSO-NTVAC) is proposed to determine the optimal location and size of multiple DG units for meshed and radial networks. The main objective is to minimize the total active power losses of the system, while satisfying several operating constraints. The proposed methodology was tested using IEEE 14-bus, 30-bus, 57-bus, 33-bus, and 69- bus systems with the change in the number of DG units from 1 to 4 DG units. The result proves that the proposed PSO-NTVAC is more efficient to solve the optimal multiple DGs allocation with minimum power loss and a high convergence rate.
A Comparative Study on Particle Swarm Optimization for Optimal Steady-State Performance of Power Systems
