Optimal SVC Sizing and Placement for Reducing Real Power Losses and Voltage Security Improvement in the Power System using DE Algorithm

The power system across the world operates at highly loaded conditions resulting in voltage instability, high system losses and decreasing voltage profile. The different economic, technical environmental and legal constraints have already provided limitations towards the extension of our existing power system as a result of which with the day to day increase in load demand, the voltage stability can be described as the ability to retain their bus voltages within desirable limits even after following sudden big disturbance in a power system. An increase in loading of the system causes an increased shortage of real and reactive power of the system, which in turn causes a fall in the bus voltages of the system. Also, FACTS devices raises power transfer capability reduces system losses and improves system stability, because of their fast and flexible control characteristics. Owing to their huge capital cost, it is essential to place these devices optimally in a power system. In this paper, Differential Evolution (DE), a population based stochastic meta-heuristic optimization algorithm is applied for optimal placement of static var compensator (SVC) aimed to the voltage security enhancement of a power system. The SVC placement is considered to be a planning problem and is formulated as a multi-criteria problem comprising of minimization of real power loss, voltage security and investment cost of SVC under single line outage contingencies. Effectiveness of the DE algorithm based approach has been demonstrated on IEEE 30-bus test system.