Reactive power provision in electricity markets considering voltage stability and transmission congestion

This article presents a new algorithm for optimal reactive power procurement in pool electricity markets. Due to the significant impact of reactive power flow on the system voltage stability and transmission loss, the objective function of the proposed algorithm is minimization of the market payment for reactive power and system energy loss, simultaneously maximizing voltage stability margin. Moreover, as another object, the algorithm tries to decrease the probability of the transmission congestion during reactive power market clearing. A four-step multi-objective mixed-integer non-linear programming technique that uses the genetic algorithm in combination with a sequential quadratic programming method is implemented in MATLAB (The MathWorks, Natick, Massachusetts, USA) to solve the proposed problem. Numerical studies on the IEEE-RTS test system show the suitability of the proposed method. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC