A Novel method for capacitor sizing and placement in distribution networks

The integration of capacitor banks in distribution network is a challenging issue. These electric resources are used as a reactive power resource for decreasing the active losses and also improving the voltage profile. In this paper a heuristic method is proposed for fixed capacitor allocation in a distribution network. The objective function to be minimized is defined as the total cost of active losses and investment costs of capacitor units. The method is applied on a test distribution network and the results are presented and discussed and compared to other methods.

Keywords:

Capacitor bank , Imperialist competition algorithm , active loss , optimization