Optimum Allocation of Reactive Power in Real-Time Operation under Deregulated Electricity Market

Deregulation in power industry has made the reactive power ancillary service management a critical task to power system operators from both technical and economic perspectives. Reactive power management in power systems is a complex combinatorial optimization problem involving nonlinear functions with multiple local minima and nonlinear constraints. This paper proposes a practical market-based reactive power ancillary service management scheme to tackle the challenge. In this paper a new model for voltage security and reactive power management is presented. The proposed model minimizes reactive support cost as an economic aspect and insures the voltage security as a technical constraint. For modeling validation study, two optimization algorithm, a genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) method are used to solve the problem of optimum alloca-tion of reactive power in power systems under open market environment and the results are compared. As a case study, the IEEE-30 bus power system is used. Results show that the algorithm is well compe-tent for optimal allocation of reactive power under practical constraints and price based conditions. KCI Citation Count: 0