Department of Electrical Engineering, Tripura University, Tripura, India.
Tripura State Electricity, Corporation Ltd., Tripura.
The electric utility business has historically consisted of centralized, large-scale power plants, supplying electric power to load centers such as cities and industries through a power transmission and distribution network. A number of independent and government studies have shown this centralized grid to be unsustainable in the long term, and prone to inefficiency, failures, and other weaknesses. Dispersed or Distributed generation is an emerging, decentralized alternative to the centralized power grid. This present study is an attempt towards determining combined benefits of greater reliability and availability for end customers allowing for more efficient energy resource usage, more security and lower transmission and distribution losses offered by the distributed generation (DG) for the electric grid as a whole. In this paper a straight forward analysis has been adopted to evaluate the performance of weak grid of Tripura (a remote state in North Eastern Region of India) with a central generation and with dispersed or distributed generations of same total generation capacity. The simulation study has been carried out with ETAP software. Simulation results show that 20% loss reduction can be possible in Tripura with DGs of smaller capacities (total 30 MW) rather to an additional central generation of 30 MW.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the present power situation of Tripura.Dispersed generation resources are discussed in Section 3. Section 4 presents the network model of Tripura. System studies are carried out in section 5. Section 6 presents the results of the present study. Socio economic benefits of dispersed generation in Tripura's perspective have been mentioned in section 7. Finally section 8 summarizes the main conclusions.
