Reactive Power Generation Management for the Improvement of Power System Voltage Stability Margin

Voltage stability margin (VSM) of the power system relates to the reactive power reserves in the network. This paper presents a method to improve the VSM by generator reactive power generation rescheduling. The management of the var generation formulated as an optimization problem and pseudo-gradient evolutionary programming (PGEP) was used to obtain the optimal solution. Modal analysis technique was used to guide the searching direction. Simulation results on the New England 39-bus system demonstrate that the proposed method is effective. Compared with the standard evolutionary programming (SEP), better solution can be obtained, and the convergence speed of the algorithm is improved also. The simulation results show that after the optimal reactive power rescheduling the reactive power reserves of the system is increased and the active/reactive power losses are decreased. The most important advantage is that, the voltage stability margin of power system can be improved without adding new var compensation equipment and changing the active power distribution