A New Approach for Capacitor Allocation in Radial Distribution Feeders

Abstract-This paper presents a new approach based on the total reactive loss in a distribution system to decide the optimal locations and sizes of the compensation shunt capacitors. This approach is implemented in two stages. First, a capacitor rated at the reactive power needed at certain busbar is directly connected at this busbar. This is applied on all buses of the distribution system simultaneously. The second is to connect a single capacitor rated at the total reactive power losses needed by the distribution system at certain bus. Optimization technique is used to determine the candidate bus at which this capacitor should be connected. This technique is built to satisfy the voltage profile and sectional loss constraints. This approach is tested on two practical distribution systems with 9 and 34-buses respectively. Computational results showed that the proposed approach could quickly achieve an optimal or near-optimal solution. The results of the proposed approach are compared with the results of those in literature. The comparison showed that the proposed approach achieves the goals of solving reactive power compensation problem for distribution systems despite its simplicity. Keywords- Distribution systems, reactive power compensation, optimization technique. I