A power quality-based planning framework for flicker minimization of wind turbines in distribution network

Renewable energy penetration in distribution networks, especially wind turbines (WTs) and photovoltaics (PVs), leads to an increase in power quality disturbances. One of the most important power quality issues is flicker produced by WTs. Here, to mitigate the flicker produced by WTs, distribution network planning (DNP) problem is solved concerning flicker minimization. For this aim, a weighted objective function is defined in which in addition to power losses, flicker emission is also considered. In the planning problem, siting and sizing of WTs as well as siting of PVs are investigated to simultaneously minimize power losses and flicker emission. Owing to the difficulty of this optimization problem, a new variant of genetic algorithm (GA), named elitist-based GA (EGA), is proposed whose crossover operator works based on the elite chromosome. This variant provides a promising way to efficiently use information from the best solution to generate new solutions. Simulation results show that optimal siting and sizing of WTs can considerably improve the network parameters in terms of power losses and flicker emission. Moreover, simulation results show the efficiency and effectiveness of EGA compared to the other studied techniques.