Abstract
The goal of many utilities is to provide an economically balanced energy delivery system that will provide customers with safe, reliable, and efficient means of power while not subjecting them to over-designs with unjustifiable cost. In achieving that goal, the utility company must rely on system designers to optimize several key parts of their delivery system. The distribution system secondary, e.g., is one of these subsystems, and therefore, it can pose optimization type challenge for the distribution system designers. Arriving at optimal solutions, serves the best interests of the utility and the long-term objectives of the customers and ratepayers. In this paper, the authors analyze many alternative intelligent choices when considering a simplified distribution system selection and show, thru the formulation and Matlab computer programming, how a simple optimization technique can arrive at a standard selection of the system components. Total Annual Cost (TAC) is the reviewed concept, and essentially, it reduces to a sum of initial capital investment, maintenance, and operating costs including the costs of system losses. The optimization process is pivotal in minimization of the TAC. Customer loadings are a key part of this selection and have been considered in the program formulation, as well. Matlab program provides the ease in selection of the components and speed in calculation performance to arrive at a most feasible answer among optimized choices. Voltage drop is the constraint in this optimization process, which is usually limited by the utility company’s requirement.