A reactive power planning procedure considering iterative identification of VAR candidate buses

This article proposes two-step procedure for solving the reactive power planning (RPP) problem. An iterative method is introduced in the first step to place the additional sources of reactive power and their associated maximum sizes. In the second step, several integrated strategies of differential evolution (DE) are suggested to optimize the RPP variables. Three types of objective function are investigated which aims at minimizing system power losses, minimizing the costs of operation and VAR investment and improving the voltage profile distribution at load buses. The strategies performance is examined on IEEE 30-bus test system and on the West Delta network as a real Egyptian section. The evolution of the system considering the annual growth rate of peak load in the Egyptian system has been taken into consideration at different loading levels. Application of the proposed method is carried out on large-scale power system of 354-bus test system. The strategies robustness and consistency are compared to DE, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimizer. The proposed two-step procedure using the proposed DE strategy is assessed compared to single-step RPP procedure. Furthermore, its mutation and crossover scales are optimally specified. Simulation outcomes denote that the proposed DE strategy is excessively superior, more powerful and consistent than the other compared optimizers which indicate that the proposed strategy of DE algorithm can be very efficient to solve the RPP. The proposed strategies are proven as alternative solution strategies, especially for large-scale power systems.