Energy efficiency performance of reconfigured radial networks with reactive power injection

Reconfiguration of radial distribution system is usually performed to diagnose the severe effects of unscheduled fluctuations or variations in power demand during on-line operation. The reconfigured network alters the resultant power flow in the system and it is required to be optimizing with and without reactive power injection. Different methods have been proposed earlier to optimize the system operation by reconfiguration and by injecting reactive power to the system using indices or soft computing techniques. Generally, these methods considered the reactive power management and network re-configuration problems independently. Therefore, the reactive power injection in the resulting configurations may lead to misleading and imperfect results about deferral values; loss reduction, improved loadability limit and other subsequent calculations. This paper presents comparative study of effect of reactive power injection on system performance in different configurations. The study is implemented in MATLAB environment and demonstrated on IEEE 33-node radial distribution system.