Optimal distributed renewable generation planning: A review of different approaches

Distributed generation has gained a lot of attractions in the power sector due to its ability in power loss reduction, increased reliability, low investment cost, and most significantly, to exploit renewable-energy resources, which produce power with minimum greenhouse-gas emissions like wind, photovoltaic and micro turbines. Installation of distributed generation at non-optimal location can result in various problems such as an increase in system losses and costs, voltage rise and fluctuations, reliability and stability problems. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an optimization or heuristic technique based methodology to identify the optimal placement of distributed renewable generation for a given system that can provide economic, environmental and technical advantages. There are several researches that study on the optimal distributed renewable generation location by their imposed constraints and objectives. However, the systematic principle for this issue is still an unsolved problem. This paper reviews some of the most popular distributed renewable generation placement methods, including 2/3 Rule, Analytical Methods, Optimal Power Flow, Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming, various types of Artificial Intelligent optimization techniques and Hybrid Intelligent System. Each methodology has its own features and potential for significantly promote the applicability of distributed renewable generation in power systems. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.