Minimizing Power Losses in High Voltage Distribution System
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The demand for electricity in Ghana keeps increasing as the population grows, which has led to concerns about power losses as well as rising energy cost. The popular convention is to increase the power production to take care the loss [1]. The project is based on the reduction in High Voltage Distribution System (HVDS) in the Upper West Region of Ghana. A distribution system takes carries electricity from the transmission system to the end user. The voltage in the buses reduces when moved away from the substation and this is because of insufficient reactive power which can be provided by capacitor shun and series compensation [2]. This project is aimed at identifying the optimal sizes and locations of a shunt capacitors to be replaced in a radial distribution system considering the overall economic savings due to power minimization and capacitor cost. The is achieved in two stages, the first step is carrying out a load flow of a pre-compensated distribution system. Loss Sensitivity Factor (LSF) is carried out based on the load flow solution to identify the potential locations for compensation. The LSF is used to identify the candidate buses. The second stage is using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to identify the sizes of the capacitors for reducing the energy loss cost and the capacitor cost.