Ant colony optimization technique for integrating renewable DG in distribution system with techno-economic objectives

Penetration of Distributed Generation (DG) is growing due to increase in the load demands. This paper addresses ant colony optimization (ACO) technique for optimum integration of DG in a distribution system for minimizing techno-economic objective function (TEOF). TEOF is composed of a power loss index, voltage deviation index and operating cost index. The various costs such as purchasing active power from the grid, DG installation, DG operation and maintenance are evaluated at normal and heavy load scenarios. The proposed methodology is examined on IEEE 33-bus (Sahoo and Prasad, Energy Convers Manag 47:3288-3306) and 85-bus Indian utility radial networks (Shuaib et al., Int J Electr Power Energy Syst 64:384-397, 2015) to carry out technical and economic analysis for solar and wind based DG. The obtained results are compared with the research outcomes of other researchers. Our results confirm that appropriate allocation of DG gives remarkable reduction in power losses of around 50-90%, improvement of minimum voltage magnitude of around 6-13% and net saving of 14-39% with two DG placement.