Reconfiguration of distribution networks to mitigate utilities power quality disturbances

Power quality has an increasing role in the deregulated electricity supply markets. Also, power quality problem affects the power reliability of demand side especially for those bulk tariff consumers or large property management companies. Therefore enhancing power quality issues is especially necessary in costumer side. Reconfiguration in practical networks is identical to disconnect sectionalizing switches and reconnect tie switches frequently in order to reduce real power losses and to improve voltage profiles. This paper specially addresses the ability of network reconfiguration to enhance power quality issues such as harmonics and voltage sags while mitigating power losses. This belongs to a complicated combinatorial optimization problem, in which the best switching status could be determined via heuristic optimization techniques. Therefore differential evolution algorithm (DEA) has been implemented to solve the nonlinear optimization problem. Simulation results in various case studies have been compared to the initial state of distribution network and then effectiveness of the proposed solution is discussed. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.