Reactive Power Expansion Planning under a Deregulated Market Power System

In deregulated electric power systems, one of the most important topics is to augment the total system social welfare. Many different methods have been carried out for this problem. One of the most viable methods to increasing system social welfare is to supply the reactive demands as locally. In this way, the reactive demands are supplied via locally reactive sources and the capacity of transmission lines is not used to transfer reactive power of demands. Thus, the congestion of lines is not reached and the system social welfare which is related to the congestion of lines is increased. In this scope, this study addresses an optimal Reactive Power Planning (RPP) in a deregulated power system. The proposed method optimizes two objective functions at the same time within one general objective. The optimized objectives are minimization of total investment in reactive power support and maximizing of total system social welfare. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to solve the optimization problem. The validity of the proposed method is verified on a typical power system.