Reliability Enhancement of Small and Medium Distribution System with Renewable Generations and Reclosers

The distribution system operator has a major responsibility of improving the system reliability and maintaining the system loss to minimum. This paper proposes a novel method of utilizing renewable generation units as Distributed Generator (DG) to simultaneously reduce distribution loss and improve distribution system reliability with the support of reclosers. The distribution system performance is improved by comparing the power loss minimization objective and Energy Not Supplied (ENS) minimization objective. The objectives are formulated as an optimization problem and solved using eminent searching feature of Cuckoo Search algorithm. By solving the non-linear objective functions, the optimal size of photovoltaic (PV) arrays and wind turbines are determined. The system is investigated with multiple DG locations identified through Loss Sensitivity Factor (LSF) and further extended by introducing reclosers for reliability improvement using analytical method. The proposed idea is tested in small and medium sized radial distribution systems.