Compensation of Distributed Generations Outage Using Controlled Switched Capacitors

Researchers recently came up with innovative ways to generate enough electricity to meet the rising demand through establishing an electricity distribution system and enhancing power quality on the customer side. One of these innovative ways is the installation of distributed generation (DG). DG is widely used in modern networks due to its great benefits of improving the voltage profile and the system’s power quality. Additionally, DGs are ideally placed near the end user in distribution systems to improve the system’s performance while minimizing power losses and enhancing voltage profile in the grid. DG recently grew in importance, and its penetration increased in most distribution systems. Due to the spreading of DG in the power system, the dynamic performance of the system is affected. This paper studies the system’s performance and behavior under condition of DG outage from the system. The model of DGs in this study assumes two cases of the power provided to the network; the first case considered DG units injecting active power only to the grid (unity power factor). In the second case, DG injects both active and reactive power to the system. After that, outage of DG units is fixed by injecting a reactive power source using a capacitor with a controlled switch to compensate the outage of DGs from the distribution system and to reduce the outage’s negative effect on the network. The sizing of capacitors is optimized using a harmony search algorithm (HSA) in the same location of the DG units.