Demand side management strategy for alleviating power shortages in Nigerian power system: A case study

Abstract

This paper presents the simulation of demand side management (DSM) strategy for alleviating power shortages in Nigerian power system. The frequent power outages in the Nigerian power system especially in the distribution network which is caused by schedule and unscheduled outages in the system in which the schedule outages are predominant, is as a result of inadequate electricity generation and equipment limitations to meet the current ever-growing energy demand. The distribution network feeders’ peak load and electricity supply was evaluated and data were collected from November 2017 to October 2018; to carry out the analysis of the network feeders’ load and its management. Consequently, modeling of the proposed DSM strategy in Simulink environment and its optimization was done using the binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) algorithm and, the simulations were carried out to test the efficacy of the model. The results of the simulations of the DSM strategy showed that the proposed method has the capacity to bring the load curve closer to an objective or desired load curve thereby reducing the blackout areas of the network per outage scheduling from 63.38% or 36.62% in the existing network to 14.08% in the proposed network and also, improved the 11 kV feeders’ availability from twelve hours currently per day to twenty-four hours in the proposed network.