Optimal Location of Series FACTS Device to Reduce the Losses in a Power System

In recent years, continuous and reliable electric energy supply is the objective of any power system operation. Over last decade FACTS devices have become popular and are very effective solution for many power system transmission problems. FACTS controllers can be used for steady state voltage regulation and control, steady state control of power flow on a transmission line transient stability enhancement, along with this it also reduces the problem of sub synchronous resonance. In this regard, Flexible Alternative Current Transmission Systems (FACTS) devices play a key role in enhancing controllability and increasing power transfer capability of the network. Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC) is an emerging FACTS device designated to achieve this objective. The conventional methods in solving optimization problems in power systems suffer from several limitations due to necessities of derivative existence, providing suboptimal solutions, etc. Computational Intelligence plays an important role in determining the optimal solutions for multi – objective functions. A combinatorial analysis problem in power systems can be solved by modern heuristic methods in finding optimal solution. Thus, in this paper, Genetic Algorithm, a wing of evolutionary computation encapsulated with heuristic approach, is proposed in finding optimal location of TCSC.  IEEE standard 30bus system is considered to test the credibility of the proposed algorithm and the results thus obtained are subjected to analysis to determine the optimal location.