Optimal deployment of fuel cells in distribution systems by using genetic algorithms

A fuel cell has been expected to be a very energy efficient and clean device and has been technologically matured to a stage of practical use. In consideration of its relatively small generation capacity, a fuel cell may be installed in a distribution network. This paper presents the framework of a method of introducing fuel cells into a radial distribution system. According to this framework, an optimal deployment problem of fuel cells is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. Since this problem has nonlinear objective function to be minimized, the optimal solution could be obtains only through an exhaustive search, which is susceptible to combinatorial explosion for large scale systems. Hence, a genetic algorithm (GA) must be an adequate method to obtain a solution within reasonable computation time. Further, several kinds of techniques to improve GA performance have been introduced in this paper. The proposed algorithm has been applied to test distribution systems of 69 and 111 nodes with successful results.