Feasibility study of SVC installation in a substation network for voltage fluctuation mitigation

The operation of electric arc furnaces (EAFs) with drastic and random voltage-current characteristics creates considerable power quality problems in the connected power network. Because of the nonlinear behaviors of the EAF loads during operations, serious voltage fluctuations have been observed at busses that connect the substation transformer and cause frequent operations of the on-load tap changer (OLTC) of the transformer, which may shorten the OLTC life and affect the voltage quality. To reduce the number of switching operations of the OLTC, it is necessary to adopt mitigation solutions. This paper presents a feasibility study of installing a static var compensator (SVC) in an actual substation network supplying two large EAF loads for mitigating the voltage fluctuation and the number of OLTC operations. The effectiveness of installing the SVC at selected busses and the corresponding size are then reported.