Performance Enhancement of Distribution Systems Using Distributed Generators and Capacitor Banks at Medium and Low Voltage Networks

This paper introduces a comparison investigation between performance enhancement of distribution systems based on capacitor banks (CBs) or distributed generators (DGs) based-PVs. This investigation, also, consider the enhancement device placement on low voltage and medium voltage networks. The importance of this comparison is to determine the economic feasibility of the enhancement devices on the distribution systems at the low or medium voltage level and determine the degree of the distribution system's performance improvement for each case. This comparison has been applied on a real 22kV, 78-bus Egyptian distribution system. This system has nineteen 22/0.4 kV distribution transformers supplying a total lumped loads of 12.5MW and 7.7MVAr. Grasshopper optimization algorithm “GOA”, which represent one of the newest heuristic technique, has been applied in this paper. The results show that it is wrong to improve distribution systems depending only on improving MV networks but enhancing the low voltage networks may be more efficient and lower cost. Also, improper number or location selection of the connected enhancement devices have a negative impact on the performance of distribution systems.