Abstract
In recent years, the substantial upsurge of electricity demand has directly impacted the performance of the distribution networks concerning the active power losses and voltage drops. In such circumstances, the distributed generators (DGs) could uphold these concerns if they are optimally deployed in terms of sizing and placement. For this reason, in current research, the optimal deployment of DGs has been proposed with the plant propagation algorithm (PPA) to simultaneously maximize the total active power loss reduction and to upgrade the magnitude of the minimum bus voltage. Alongside, the authors have examined four rounds of DGs. In that context, the optimal deployment of one DG is investigated in the first round. In each succeeding round, the number of DGs is increased: in the second round, this investigation is carried out for two DGs, for three DGs in the third round, and finally, for four DGs in the fourth round of the investigation. The effectiveness of the proposed PPA has been tested on IEEE 33 and 69-bus test networks in the load flow analysis, and results are compared with the standard optimization algorithms. Thereafter, a post deployment economic assessment based on loss calculation has been undertaken out as well. The ANOVA test has also been performed for statistical evaluation of standard algorithms. The simulation results exhibit that the proposed algorithm outdo other algorithms both technically and economically. It has been seen that as the deployment of DGs is increased, the total active power losses and voltage drops are also reduced. In terms of economic assessments, the total cost decreases with the increased deployment of DGs in IEEE 33-bus test network, whereas, the total cost increases with the increased deployment of DGs in IEEE 69-bus test network.