Voltage control areas for reactive power management using clustering approach in deregulated power system

In this paper, a new K-means clustering based approach for identification of voltage control areas is developed. Voltage control areas are important for efficient reactive power management in power systems operating under deregulated environment. Voltage control areas formed using conventional hierarchical clustering based method is already presented in literature and used for efficient reactive power management The present paper investigates the capability of K-means clustering for the purpose of identifying voltage control areas. The proposed method is tested and compared for IEEE 24 bus RTS and IEEE 30 bus system. The results show that this K-means based method is competing with conventional hierarchical approach.