Abstract:
Rapid population growth, resource scarcity, rural-urban migration, severe poverty, socioeconomic inequality etc. can be recognized as the foremost challenges, faced by the most of the countries in the world including Sri Lanka. Almost all the major cities are now rapidly becoming urban, which leads to emergence of massive problems related to infrastructure, portable water & sanitation, electricity, housing development etc. As a result, planned cities have been introduced while giving solutions for complex processes of urban planning.
One of the critical challenges in urban planning is to provide sufficient medium voltage distribution, to cater the increasing demand associated with the development. Even though many numbers of researches has been conducted to introduce optimum solutions to address this matter in various places in the world, no literature was found to discuss the optimum value for medium voltage distribution and optimum locations for the complete distribution system. It was evident that common papers about optimal distribution design do not include practical examples of a true multi objective optimization of an actual complete system of significant dimensions as those papers were discussing on existing networks or extensions to existing networks as improvements.
This paper presents new criteria for medium voltage selection, optimum location selection and minimization of losses in the Medium Voltage network. Finally a general model was developed to assist city planners to arrange the medium voltage power distribution for the planned cities.
Due to easy access to information, Colombo port city was selected as the case study in this research study. There are four available locations (A, B, C & D) for GSS in port city conceptual master plan and it was found that “B” and “C” were optimum locations for GSS. The optimum value for the MV power distribution is 22kV. The significant gain of the discussed methodology is that, it provides a set of solutions that can be considered simultaneously. Accordingly, this guide will not only raise awareness and build capacities in this regard, but will also offer directions for upcoming initiatives in this regard.
