Abstract
The notion of the "smart grid" has led stakeholders in the power industry to promote more efficient technologies to the network. Distribution systems are a favorite place to host most of these technologies including Renewable-based distributed generation (DG). Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs) in particular have proved their usefulness for supplying a fair portion of power demand; however, the power output of WTGs is mainly dependent on the stochastic nature of the site's wind speed in addition to the design parameters of WTGs. Furthermore, WTGs can only be suitably utilized when their capacities and locations are optimized in such a way to achieve certain goals. In this paper, the effect of wind generator design parameters, namely cut-in, cut-out, and rated wind speeds, on the problems of sizing and siting WTGs-based DGs is addressed. The probabilistic optimization model is used to minimize the system's annual energy losses, and the results reveal that the design parameters of WTGs must be carefully selected due to their strong effect on system losses and DG locations and capacities.