A new reactive power planning procedure for Iranian Power Grid

Reactive power planning has received considerably attention during the last few years. Allocation of reactive power resources of both static (ex. switchable capacitors and/or reactors) and dynamic (ex. static VAr compensators, or SVCs) types can have major impacts on voltage security (i.e. voltage profile and stability) and active power losses. They, however, impose costs so that the planning procedure is, indeed, an optimization problem in which the resources should be so allocated and sized that optimum performance, in terms of voltage profile and stability and minimum active power losses are achieved while, at the same time, minimum reactive power resource costs are imposed. This problem is addressed in this paper for the multi-zone Iranian Power Grid. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed to solve the resulting multi-objective optimization problem. The system under study is a large-scale test case so that new approaches are proposed to tackle the problem. Implementation of the results are underway. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.