The five major factors that contribute to the renewed interest in distributed generation (DG) system:
- Electricity market liberalization
- Developments in DG technologies
- Increased customer demand for highly reliable electricity.
- Environmental concerns.
- Constraints on the construction of new transmission lines.
ADVANTAGES OF DISTRIBUTED GENERATION SYSTEMS:
ADVANTAGES OF DISTRIBUTED GENERATION SYSTEMS:
UTILITY PERSPECTIVE:
- On-site power supply avoids transmission and distribution losses.
- Increasing the efficiency compared with central power generation.
- Diversification of power sources.
- A possible solution to constraints on new transmission lines.
- Provides cleaner power by using renewable sources such as wind and sun.
- Better quality of power.
- Hedge against uncertain load growth and high market.
CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE:
- Improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse- gas emission through combined heat and power (CHP) plants and renewable sources.
- Improved reliability by having back-up generation.
- Receiving compensation from the utility for making their generation capacity available to the power system in areas with power shortages.
COMMERCIAL POWER PRODUCER:
- distributed generation systems with their comparatively small size and short lead times as well as their different technologies, allow players in electricity market to respond in a flexible way to changing market conditions.
- To sell ancillary services (such as reactive power and stand by capacity etc.)