Injection of Reactive Power Support for Enhanced Performance of Radial Distribution Network

One of the most common occurrences with customers connected to radial feeders most especially customers at the far of the network is the issue of low voltage supply due to excessive real power loss along the feeder route length and these issues have adverse effects on the effective functioning of the end users connected pieces of electrical equipment. The use of reactive power support for minimization of loss on the radial feeder and also enhancement of the system voltage profile has proven to be beneficiary in releasing the feeder capacity and enhancing the performance of the network under light and heavy load conditions. Premise on this, this work proposed the utilization of shunt capacitors as reactive power support using Thinker's corner 34-bus radial feeder as a test case system. The backward forward stroke was used for load flow, the voltage stability index was used for the pre-selection of vulnerable buses susceptible to voltage collapse while the Cuckoo search algorithm was engaged as an optimization algorithm for selecting the best sites and sizes where the inclusion of the reactive support will be most beneficiary to the system. The optimal sites selected are buses 30, 27, and 24 while the optimum size of shunt capacitors placed at these locations are 1000, 200, and 58.04 kVAr respectively. The inclusion of shunt capacitors appreciably dropped the active power loss (kW) to 22.46% which implies that the base case loss enjoys a reduction from 245.41 to 190.28 kW. Also, the bus where the least voltage magnitude was observed experienced a substantial increment from 0.9361 to 0.9435 p.u which is equivalent to 0.79% enhancement. Similarly, system stability was found to improve judging from VSI value shortly after the incorporation of reactive power support. The techniques implemented in this work can effectively strengthen the network performance appreciably.