Loss Reduction and Voltage Improvement by Network Reconfiguration

Nowadays, the electricity demand is increasing day by day, and hence it is very important not only to extract electrical energy from all possible new power resources, but also to reduce power losses to an acceptable minimum level in the existing distribution networks, where a large amount of power dissipation occurred. In Myanmar, a lot of power is remarkably dissipated in distribution system. Among several methods in reducing system power losses, network reconfiguration method is employed for loss minimisation, and also voltage profile improvement in this research. Network reconfiguration in distribution systems is performed by opening sectionalising (normally closed) and closing tie (normally open) switches of the network. The benefits of network reconfiguration are loss reduction, voltage profile improvement and freeing up the power system capacity. Exhaustive search techniques, an optimisation tool which is also applied in order to achieve the minimal loss switching scheme. The distribution network for existing and reconfiguration conditions are modeled and simulated by Electrical Transient Analyzer Program (ETAP) 7.5 version software.