Background

The majority of electric power systems utilize, in the electric distribution system, feeders which carry three phases of alternating current/voltage. It is desirable for electric utilities and providers of electric power distribution systems to have approximately equal loads on each phase. This is a problem as even if loads are initially balanced, with time loads increase, decrease, are added, or are removed from each phase, which causes an imbalance of loads. Even during the same day there may be much variation of load on each phase of a feeder.

Technology

The present invention provides an apparatus and method for load-balancing of a three phase electric power distribution system that has a multi-phase feeder by obtaining topology information of the feeder that identifies supply points for a plurality of customer loads and feeder sections between the supply points, that obtains customer information, including peak customer load at each of the points between each of the plurality of feeder sections, that performs a phase balancing analysis, and that recommends phase assignment at one or more supply points for the plurality of customer loads.

Advantages

Efficient implementation of exhaustive enumeration Lowers costs in manual systems and the amount of perturbation in automatic systems

Application

Provide guidance/decisions on which tap changes on a feeder to bring the multiphase currents into a better balance Manual or automatic fashion of phase balancing