Abstract
The increasing demand of electrical energy led to power grid expansion. Increased transmitted power caused power losses to increase and voltage levels to deviate. This represented a problem that utilities always try to deal with. Various devices as well as techniques are tried and developed to reduce system losses and maintain voltage profile while transmitting large MW's. One of these methods is to use small energy sources (called distributed generation DG) which include renewable energy sources and others in distribution systems closer to the loads. This paper aims at finding the best capacities and locations of DG's in typical distribution systems. It will be applied to the IEEE 33-bus radial distribution system to achieve the lowest loss and improved bus-voltages. Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) is implemented based on the Power Flow(backward / forward sweep) to determine the optimum capacities and location of distributed generators. Both active and reactive power will be considered capacity determination.