GA Based Optimal STATCOM Placement for Improvement of Voltage Stability

Modern power systems are planned to run efficiently and supply power on demand to different load centers. The overloading of transmission lines causes the deficit of reactive power that may ultimately lead to voltage collapse. This phenomenon can be extensively avoided by introducing fast dynamic control over reactive power by means of high power electronic controllers. It makes the system flexible and continuous load variations are adapted. In this paper Static Synchronous Controller (STATCOM) devices has been considered as these are flexible, and provides desired characteristics and can be relied. The proposed method is tested on IEEE 30 bus system. In the first stage, voltage magnitude and phase angle at each node of IEEE 30 bus system with and without STATCOM has been computed by applying Newton Raphson (NR) method. In the second stage, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is implemented in order to infer the optimal location for placing the STATCOM. After the optimal positioning of the STATCOM, losses are reduced. In this paper a comparative result before the application of STATCOM and after optimal placement of STATCOM in the network has also been put forward.