Decomposition of unbalanced operation incremented active power loss in distribution network

Unbalanced operation of distribution networks, as a crucial but inevitable aspect of power quality, brings about economic and technical issues. The increase in active power loss is more concerning due to the economic and technical implications. Economic sustainability of liberalized distribution networks is hugely tied to the availability of transparent and effective approaches to determine the stakeholders of this sort of phenomenon. This is done by awarding/penalizing them accordingly. Studies in the literature have not considered the incremental losses that unbalanced operations cause to distribution systems. Here, a mathematical approach based on vector analysis in the symmetrical components space is introduced. This approach quantifies the contribution of each unbalanced load to unbalanced operation and increased power losses. This technique discriminates between the mutual effects of different unbalanced loads on the power losses of the entire network. By means of the proposed approach, the best candidate unbalanced load(s)/location(s) to perform the corrective balancing actions and their ranking are precisely specified. Vector representation of the developed method simplifies its understanding, utilization, and expansion. For validation, the proposed method is applied to the IEEE 37-bus test distribution network under various scenarios. The results confirm the sound results and practical merits of the developed method.