Reducing Distribution Losses using Distributed Reactive Power Support

Reactive power balance between supply and demand plays major role in stability of power system. Reactive power effects Voltage stability of the system. Voltage control in an electrical power system is important for proper operation of electrical power equipment,to reduce transmission losses and to maintain the ability of the system to withstand and prevent voltage collapse. A voltage collapse may occurs when the system load becomes more than the voltage stability limit. Decreasing reactive power supply causes voltage to fall while increasing it causing voltage to rise. But moving reactive power on the transmission system incurs real power losses. It is better to serve Reactive power locally. Even though there are many sources of reactive power available at transmission and substation level most of them are costly. We can supply the reactive power into the System from consumer end using their smart devices and adjust the voltage locally. Thus, in this thesis the problem of reactive power supply support in the radial distribution system has been addressed. This is done by making use of end users of smart devices which supply reactive power. The solution approach involves the following steps. Firstly, by identifying the buses at which reactive power sources are available and loads at each bus then running the load flow of the system and identifying the best location to inject the external reactive power is done and finally we get the result in form of reduction in the power loss in the system.The test system IEEE 33 Bus Radial Distributed System has been used in this study. The entire algorithm has been implemented in Matlab programming language. The beneficiaries of this study include, distribution system operators, consumers in the distribution system and, the end consumers in the smart grid.