New heuristic strategies for reactive power compensation of radial distribution feeders

In this paper, the authors introduce two new heuristic techniques for reactive power compensation in radial distribution feeders. The methods can be considered as generalization ideas that emerged from recent heuristic search strategies and lead to better results. The methods formulae are derived and the techniques are applied to three feeders. Results of the proposed approaches are compared with previous methods to show the superiority of the proposed methods. To show the closeness or remoteness from the optimal solution after implementing these methods, a new algorithm using the variational technique, is presented to obtain the optimal capacitor allocation according to available standard sizes of capacitors.