Adequate Planning of Shunt Power Capacitors Involving Transformer Capacity Release Benefit

Abstract

The installation of new shunt power capacitors (SPCs) through transmission networks releases significant megavoltampere capacities of transformers that have a high impact on transmission and distribution systems, particularly for highly loaded networks. The maximization of this important benefit is proposed to be incorporated in a new formulation of the reactive power planning (RPP) problem. The loss in value resulting from the use of SPCs during the lifetime is taken into account in its capital purchase costs. For solving this multiobjective RPP formulation, a new variant of the differential evolution (DE) algorithm (DE/best/1) is employed with the Pareto concept. The proposed approach is tested on the standard IEEE 30-bus system and the West Delta region (WDN) system as a part of the Egyptian unified network with different objective functions. The simulation results demonstrate the potential and outperformance of the proposed approach to solve the RPP problem compared with other approaches.