Economic apraisal of optimal location and sizing of capacitors in radial distribution systems using PSO

The principal roles of capacitors in power systems are to supply reactive power to minimize loss and to improve the voltage profile. The optimization problem has to find the appropriate placement of capacitors that lead both to minimal system power losses and minimal total capacitor costs. This problem is largely presented in literature and is commonly solved using heuristic optimization techniques. However, the project profitability depends on prices and economical context. In this paper, a project economical appraisal was combined with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique in order to assess the profitability of the optimal capacitor installation in a 33-bus distribution network. A comparison between two objective functions and different locations numbers to install capacitor banks has been done.