| dc.description.abstract | Losses are the difference between energy entering the network and that leaving to be utilized by the final consumer. These losses are divided into technical and non-technical (commercial) losses. Technical losses are attributed to the physical properties of the components of the power system making them highly prone to failure, unreliability, inefficiency and poor performance.
This project entirely focuses on the technical loss analysis of the 33kV network basing on the 2016 UMEME network. The basis of the analysis is attributed to the fact that UMEME has long been concentrating on one single blanket strategy in their process of analyzing the technical losses through the process of choosing the high loss feeders and concentrating on those for analysis. This has been ignoring the contribution of these other feeder categories in terms of industrial, commercial and domestic (rural and urban) on the entire network losses. Therefore, the project looks at how different analysis strategies can be applied to these different feeder categories for effective analysis of these technical losses.
The methodology applied to fulfill the analysis includes modeling the 33kV 2016 network using DigSilent power factory with the main assumption being lumping the 33kV network and the transformers on the 33kV bus bars to enable the concentration on the 33kV network during the analysis. Using the formula, 𝑃𝐿 = 𝐼2𝑅, the feeder losses were obtained from which the ten high loss feeders from every single of the three categories was chosen. For the analysis of different feeder categories, the loss reduction strategies include feeder upgrade for industrial feeders, feeder splitting for domestic feeders and both feeder splitting and feeder upgrade for commercial feeders.
With the well-set objectives and methodology, the results obtained in this analysis was 4.5% technical loss on the network which is a drift off the 6.6% on the actual network but this includes 33kV and 11kV, therefore, the 2.1% allowance was left for the 11kV.From the above analysis strategies of the ten high loss feeders which sum up to a wholesome total of 30 feeders, it was observed that the general loss reduction was seen on the 30 feeders was from 2.26% to a lesser 1.7% hence a reduction of 0.576%.The contribution of the different feeder categories was obtained on a pie-chart where it was observed that industrial contributes 88%, 9% for commercial and 3% for domestic feeders.
The above analysis and the respective results depict that the strategy is highly viable and effective due to the fact that different category analysis brings a better overview of the feeders since it can be observed that the drivers of technical loss in these feeder categories differ according to the different feeder characteristics like feeder lengths, loading on these feeders. Furthermore, from the project investment analysis, it can be seen that the investment in the loss reduction strategy can be recovered within a short operating period to clear all the capital and maintenance costs involved. | |
