ABSTRACT

Capacitors have been used to provide reactive power compensation in distribution

systems. They are provided to minimize power losses and to maintain voltage profile within the
acceptable limits. The amount of capacitance to be placed very much linked to the location in
the distribution system. Thus capacitor placement problem is essentially determination of the
location, size, number and type of capacitors to be placed in the system.
The capacitor placement problem is a well research topic and has been addressed by
many researchers. Most of the approaches have the common defect of being caught to a local
solution whereas genetic algorithm (GA) searches for a global solution. A new approach for
finding the optimal size and location of capacitors using GA is reported in this dissertation. The
proposed technique finds optimal location for fixed and switched shunt capacitors from the
daily load curve.
The Genetic algorithm (GA) has been used to solve the capacitor placement problem in
the radial distribution system. The problem is how to optimally determine the location to install
the capacitors, the types and sizes of the capacitors to be installed and during each load level,
the control schemes for each capacitor in the nodes of a general 3-phase radial distribution
networks such that a desired objective function is minimized, while the load constraints,
network constraints and operational constraints at different load levels are satisfied.
Network is reconfigured, from radial topology to a weekly meshed topology.
Considering the tie lines between the nodes which will reduce the losses and improve the
voltage profile.
The objective function considered here consists of three terms: Cost of energy loss , cost
related to capacitor installation and penalty factor for voltage constraint. A sensitivity analysis
method is used to select the candidate installation location of the capacitor to reduce search
space of this problem a prior. A constant complex matrix method is used to compute the power
flow which takes less time compared to other methods and sparsity of the jacobian is exploited
to make the memory requirements small. The results obtained for 205-Bus and 881-Bus
systems are compared with Particle swarm optimization(P.S.O)