A review on optimal sizing and siting of distributed generation system: Integrating distributed generation into the grid

The non-conventional resources like sun and wind are never-ending, reliable and pollution less sources of power. When such limited size renewable sources situated close to load centers are used for generating power, they are termed as distributed energy resources (DER) or Distributed Generation (DG). After the Kyoto protocol on climate change there is thrust to preserve depleting reserves of conventional fuels i.e. coal and petroleum. One of the ways to achieve the same is through integrating these DER into the present electric supply system. The DER can be used in isolation or in integration with the existing system. Integration of DER with the grid supply helps to provide continuous supply of electricity with overall improvement in the system performance. The capacity sizing and siting (also called location allocation) of the DG is an important consideration for economic operation with lowest investment. It is a large scale non linear multi-objective constrained optimization problem with high dimension and practical constraints. A review on optimal sizing and siting of DG system has been attempted in this paper. The various solution techniques and objective functions along with various constraints applicable for the solution of optimal sizing and siting problem of DG are discussed and compared in this paper.