Probabilistic determination of pilot points for zonal voltage control

Owing to the local nature of voltage and reactive power control, the voltage control is managed in a zonal or regional basis. A new comprehensive scheme for optimal selection of pilot points is proposed in this study. The uncertainties of operational and topological disturbances of the power system are included to provide the robustness of the pilot node set. To reduce the huge number of probable states (i.e. combined states of load and topological changes), a scenario reduction technique is used. The resulted optimal control problem is solved using a new immune-based genetic algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is verified over IEEE 118-bus and realistic Iranian 1274-bus national transmission grids.