Load Factor Improvement of Distribution Feeders by Feeder Reconfiguration Using Modified BPSO Considering Losses

Restructuring of power industry has now become a global trend as a method of best practice, reforming the power sector towards a more competitive market. In retail energy market, there are multiple choices for end-users based on their bidding price, reliability, power quality and mutual agreements. The participants take timely information from the market and can make and prepare for strategies to get more and more benefits. The consumers can adjust their loads based on various offers and price signals from the market since the aim of the consumers is to buy cheaper energy with acceptable quality. Every particular area is fed by a number of distribution feeders consisting of consumers having different consumption patterns. To take advantage of this diversity and hence to improve the load factors of individual distribution feeders, the loads can be aggregated through feeder reconfiguration. The higher value of load factor attracts the suppliers and hence the bargaining power of consumers increases. This paper illustrates the aggregation of loads through feeder reconfiguration for improvement of load factor. The losses before and after reconfiguration are calculated and total cost of energy supply are compared. Three feeder network from Patan substation of Nepal Electricity Authority is considered for analysis. Binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) as an optimization technique is used since the problem of reconfiguration is binary type of problem. Test results show that after reconfiguration, the load factors are improved and the overall cost of energy supply is reduced because of this, although the losses increased after the reconfiguration of the network.