Investigation of the Impacts of Primary Substation’s OLTC on Voltage Regulators Placement in Distribution Systems

In this paper, it is attempted to demonstrate the impact of Primary Substation’s (PS) On Load Tap Changer (OLTC) on Voltage Regulator (VR) placement problem in distribution systems. As the voltage of primary substation continuously changes because of the tap operation of the OLTC, the voltage changes directly affect the required number and location of VRs from distribution system planning point of view. Therefore in this paper, importance of PS’s OLTC modeling is established in order to have reliable and feasible VR placement. Genetic Algorithm (GA) has been utilized to eliminate voltage violations and minimize power losses by placing VRs throughout the whole distribution system. The simulation results insist on the fact that the consideration of OLTC’s Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) significantly influences the results of the VR placement problem.