Energy management scheme for irrigation pump load

The load management of utility feeders for rural irrigation in India is a tough task due to various uncertainties of demand and pilferage of power. Presently most of the Indian utilities manage the irrigation load either by switching off 11 KV feeders by rotation or single phasing of 11 KV feeders by rotation. Because of these methods power supply gets interrupted even for domestic, commercial and industrial loads. Further many consumers still run pump sets using single phase to three phase converters therefore overloading the two phases of the distribution transformer, which may lead to winding failure of distribution transformers. Therefore an urgent need is felt to switch over to a new scheme which shall overcome the drawbacks of the present practices and results in energy as well as monetary savings. This electronic document is a `live´ template. The various components of your paper [title, text, heads, etc.] are already defined on the style sheet, as illustrated by the portions given in this document. This paper presents the optimal solution for load management of irrigation pump load by considering a real time load of one of the utility region in Punjab state of India. With this solution the power supply shall not be disturbed for domestic and commercial load along with full utilization for irrigation pump sets also. The power consumption by the pumps will also increase every year due to lowering ground water level and multiple cropping in a year. Therefore the losses should be reduced with increased demand of power in irrigation sector to ensure reliable power supply. Also the load should be properly distributed to give a good load factor. This will result in savings of max demand, which can be utilized at some other place. Further, with this reduced load the line losses will also reduce. Some additional measures for energy management of the irrigation pump loads on the transformer are proposed in this paper as introduction of LT capacitors and use of amorp- ous core transformers. The introduction of LT capacitor panels results in power factor correction along with additional savings in the form of line losses. Also old transformers can be changed with amorphous metal transformers, in phases, to realize savings in no -load losses. The paper presents cost-benefit analysis for the real time load of one of the utility region in Punjab state of India which shows payback period of less than one year for these options.