Automatic reactive compensation at 11 kV

In order to fulfil reactive power requirements, capacitors need to be switched in during the load pickup period in the morning and switched out during the load dropping period in the evening. This creates a heavy workload on the control engineers, distracting their attention in monitoring the power system and delaying their responses to site operations. In order to reduce the workload of the control engineers, China Light and Power Co. Ltd. studied several methods of automating these switching operations. Finally, it was decided to develop a software application to automate the switching of these capacitors. This paper describes this automatic capacitors switching application