Optimum Positioning and Sizing of Biomass Distributed Generators for Real Power Transmission Congestion Management

Abstract

The energy market today allows for bidirectional transactions between utilities and consumers, even within traditional practices. Factors like generator failures, maintenance of transmission lines, and high network demand can cause overheating and failures in transmission lines and equipment, resulting in contingencies within the transmission network. Methods like load shedding, rescheduling of generators, and insertion of renewable energy-based distributed generators (DGs) are various alternatives for alleviating congestion in the network lines, i.e., the transmission lines or other network elements operate at or beyond their designed capacity, restricting the flow of electricity. In this work, the insertion of renewable energy DGs at their optimal location is proposed as a novel approach for alleviating the congestion in the network lines. Firstly, the real power transmission capability distribution factors are evaluated to determine the optimal location for integrating the renewable energy DGs concerning the congested line. Furthermore, these types of DGs, which are solar, wind, and biomass, are considered along with the modeling of uncertainties in the solar and wind. The Beta and the Weibull probability distribution functions are employed to explore the uncertainty in solar and wind DGs, respectively. Furthermore, the optimal capacity of Biomass DG has been obtained by minimizing real power losses and the voltage stability margin chosen for alleviating the congestion in the network lines. The newly evolved algorithm, Grey Wolf Optimization, has been employed to solve the multi-objective optimization problem of interest. The performance of Grey Wolf - Multi-Objective Optimization is verified on a standard IEEE-30 (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) bus system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results show that the size of biomass DG and real power losses are obtained as 9.9533 MW and 9.3055 MW, respectively.

Cite this article as: S. K. Warungase and M. V. Bhatkar, “Optimum positioning and sizing of biomass distributed generators for real power transmission congestion management,” Electrica, 25, 0071, 2025. doi: 10.5152/electrica.2025.24071.