Impact of varying photovoltaic penetration on minimum loss reconfiguration

The novelty of this paper is that it incorporates real world situation like photovoltaic (PV) penetration variability in a test network in order to evaluate its impact on the reconfiguration of the network with an aim to reduce the losses. This paper shows that an incremental increase in PV penetration will result in either the same optimal configuration or in a configuration that is very similar in the sense that the new optimal configuration is obtained by simply transferring the terminal load between feeders of the previous optimal configuration. This result helps in avoiding the computational effort in finding the optimal configuration when an incremental change occurs in PV penetration. A simple parameter namely the minimum power loss reduction parameter helps in deciding the feeders involved in the load transfer.