Genetic algorithm for weight assignment in optimum planning of multiple distributed generations to minimize energy losses

Renewable distributed generation (DG) is attracting special attention in order to meet the growing demand. Wind energy will drive rapid growth of distributed renewable energy systems in rural and remote areas worldwide. The one of the major potential benefits offered by DG concept is the reduction of total system losses. Because of the time-varying characteristics of both generation and load, energy loss minimization should be considered instead of power loss minimization. In this paper, a new and simple methodology is proposed to find optimal sizes and locations of DGs in order to minimize energy losses. This method is based on genetic algorithm and weighting factor. The effectiveness of proposed method is tested on the IEEE-30 bus mesh network. The results show that the proposed method is capable of finding the optimal sizing of DG to minimize energy losses for candidate DG buses.