Feeder reconfiguration for load factor improvement

Power industry restructuring has created many opportunities for customers to reduce their electricity bills. Load aggregation allows customers to purchase electricity at a lower price. In some contracts, load factor is considered as one critical aspect of aggregation. Distribution systems supply electricity to different mixtures of customers. To facilitate load aggregation in distribution networks, a feeder reconfiguration application for improving the load factor in a distribution subsystem is illustrated in this paper. This application is based on binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) technique and customer load profiles data obtained from load survey. Test results based on a simple sample network have shown that the proposed feeder reconfiguration method can effectively improve the feeder load factors, and the BPSO technique is efficient in searching for the optimal solution.