The Impacts of Distributed Energy Sources on Distribution Network Reconfiguration

Thanks to the recent improvements in renewable energy technologies throughout the world, distributed energy sources are now playing an undeniable role in supplying the electricity in distribution networks. This paper studies the impacts of utilizing distributed generation units on the task of network reconfiguration in distribution systems. Considering the importance of reducing voltage drops and voltage sags in distribution systems, network reconfiguration is formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem in this study to minimize these two objective functions. A Pareto-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm is proposed to identify a Pareto frontier representing the alternative high-quality suboptimal configurations. The proposed optimization method is tested on a 69-bus distribution system to demonstrate the performance of the algorithm.