Minimizing Power Loss in Distribution System Considering Mass Charging Station Operation

Electric vehicle (EV) is an increasingly popular alternative to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. To promote mass adoption of EVs, charging stations (CS) must be built in large number to alleviate “range anxiety” among drivers. However, massive installation of CS behaves as additional load on the distribution network, resulting in adverse impacts such as power loss and voltage deviation at various buses. In this research, capacitor bank installation is suggested as a solution to reduce power loss in a network with CS. The purpose of this study is to develop an optimization algorithm known as particle swarm optimisation (PSO to find the optimised solution for capacitor bank placement and sizing. In the first phase of this study, a test case that consist of a 33-bus radial distribution network system with 16 level 2 CS is proposed and load flow analysis is carried out to quantify the impact of CS installation. Modelling of the distribution network and CS are done in MATLAB environment. In the second phase, PSO algorithm is developed in MATLAB and used to minimize the objective function of total line losses in the proposed test case. Results showed that addition of CS to the network causes excessive power loss and degradation in the bus voltage profile. However, 4 capacitors placed at optimum location and sizes determined by the PSO algorithm was able to reduce power loss by approximately 29%. The study concludes that capacitor banks can be used for minimizing power loss in the distribution system due to massive CS installation. Furthermore, PSO is viable metaheuristic technique for solving optimisation problem regarding capacitor placement in a distribution system. This study is useful as a guide to control the impact of massive CS deployment in future distribution system.