Placement of static VAR compensators to minimize power system losses

A screening method to find the optimal location of static VAR compensators and other reactive elements in a power system to minimize the power loss is presented. The sensitivity of the power loss to reactive power injection at all the system buses is calculated. It is assumed that a low sensitivity at a bus indicates that adding a reactive element at that bus is not effective in reducing the power loss, P_loss. A 30-bus and a 57-bus systems are used to test the validity of this assumption. The computational requirements to calculate all the sensitivity coefficients are little more than one Newton-Raphson iteration of an ac load-flow analysis using an already factorized Jacobian.