ALLOCATION AND SIZING OF DISTRIBUTED GENERATION USING MULTI-PERIOD PARTICLE SWARM ALGORITHM
Recently, there is a strong worldwide trend for renewable energy sources to reach higher levels of penetration, mainly linked to electricity distribution networks. In this Master's dissertation qualification work, a multi-period optimization was applied using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to allocate and dimension the photovoltaic generation (PV) in the network. The algorithm identified in this work as MPSO considers the intermittency of the PV generation and the limits and network characteristics. The MPSO proved to be an excellent tool to identify the locations and size of PV generations in the analyzed networks. Initial tests were performed on two systems, one with 141 buses and the other with 34 buses. A detailed analysis of the MPSO performance demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method to find good solutions, considering the reduction of active power losses. The proposed algorithm was able to find solutions that reduce grid losses by more than 95%, when compared to the case without PV generation.