Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch with Time-Varying Demand and Renewable Energy Uncertainty Using Rao-3 Algorithm

The appropriate control and management of reactive power is of great relevance in the electrical reliability, stability, and security of power grids. This issue is considered in order to increase system efficiency and to maintain voltage under the acceptable value range. In this regard, novel technologies as FACTS, renewable energies, among others, are varying conventional grid behavior leading to unexpected limit capacity reaching due to large reactive power flow. Thus, optimal planning of this must be considered. This paper proposes a new application for a simple and easy implementation optimization algorithm, called Rao-3, to solve the constrained non-linear optimal reactive power dispatch problem. Moreover, the integration of solar and wind energy as the most applied technologies in electric power systems are exploited. Due to the continuous variation and the natural intermittence of wind speed and solar irradiance as well as load demand fluctuation, the uncertainties which have a global concern are investigated and considered in this paper. The proposed single-objective and multi-objective deterministic/stochastic optimal reactive power dispatch algorithms are validated using three standard test power systems, namely IEEE 30-bus, IEEE 57-bus, and IEEE 118-bus. The simulation results show that the proposed optimal reactive power dispatch algorithms are superior compared with two recent algorithms (Artificial electric field algorithm (AEFA) and artificial Jellyfish Search (JS) algorithm) and other optimization algorithms used for solving the same problem.