Abstract

Reactive power optimization (RPO) is an important issue for providing the secure and economic run of the power systems. The importance of reactive power planning on economic profit and secure running has been increasing, because of the increasing fuel costs and investment funds. It is also quite important for an electric operator to provide voltage in a specified range for the customers. As such, RPO provides voltage control in power systems. Furthermore, it is used for decreasing active power loss and making better power coefficents. In this study, multi-objective RPO was used considering voltage deviations of buses, active power losses and reactive power generator costs. In this study, a new metaheuristic optimization method, which is an artificial bee colony (ABC), was used for the optimization. However, ABC was applied on ten bus system and the results were compared with the improving strength pareto evolutionary algorithm. It was observed that the system runs more effectively and economically with the results found with ABC.

Key words: Artificial bee colony, reactive power optimization, active power loss.