The electricity consumption has been continuously increasing due to rapid population growth, economic growth and developing industrial sectors. Therefore, it is necessary to forecast the future load demand and expand generation capacity to meet the increasing load demand. This paper presents a methodology to determine the optimal location for installing a new generating unit in which the technical, economic and environmental aspects are all taken into consideration. The location that yields the minimum overall fuel cost, total emission and system loss is considered as the optimal location for installing the new generating unit. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed in the proposed methodology to solve the optimization problem. The proposed methodology would be appropriate for an electric utility with a central planning organization. Case studies are carried out on IEEE 14-bus system to illustrate the potential of the new approach. The results show that the method works effectively and applicable to practical network.
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