An Empirical Relationship for Capacitor Bank Requirement for Distribution Utilities

Load growth and seasonal variations in loading pattern are two key factors for the poor voltage profile in power distribution utilities (DISCOM). Shunt capacitor banks are the most economical compensating devices widely preferred for local reactive power management & voltage control in these utilities. In most of the large sized power systems, the network data is not readily available for modelling DISCOM and this is a great hurdle for identifying reactive power compensation requirement for DISCOM. Regional Power Committees are engaged in coordination with transmission utilities for management of reactive power exchange for better voltage control during their operations. Regional Power Committee are not in a position to validate/guide the DISCOM for Capacitor Bank requirement due to non-availability of DISCOM Network. In this article, an empirical relationship for capacitor bank requirement for DISCOM has been developed based on the variation in loading profile and nature of loading for a defined DISCOM network. This identified capacitor bank requirement is validated against the amount of compensation needed at upstream transmission substation level. In this research work, it has been observed that proposed empirical relationship for capacitor bank requirement is quite a handily tool for estimating capacitor requirement without modelling the DISCOM network.