Umudike Journal of Engineering and Technology

The control of voltage level has been identified as an important operational need for efficient and reliable operation of power system. Prolong operation of power system equipment at voltage level outside the allowable range (0.85 to 1.10pu) could adversely affect their performance and may cause forced outages. This paper presents the use of Genetic Algorithm (GA) based tuning of On-Load Tap Changer (OLTC) transformer for voltage regulation in power system network with the objective of minimizing buses voltage deviations and reduction of transformer tap changing operations in the event of voltage fluctuations. The simulation work was carried out on 330kV, 32-bus Nigerian power system in MATLAB R2013a platform using power system analysis toolbox (PSAT). The GA based tuned OLTC demonstrated superior performance over the conventional OLTC method in terms of reduction of the network buses voltage deviations from 1.63% to 0.8% and also the reduction in transformer taps changing operations by 11.11%. More so, the speed of operation of the GA based OLTC is faster (16.25seconds) when compared with the conventional OLTC that recorded time in excess of 45 seconds.