Optimal location and size of photovoltaic systems in high voltage transmission power networks

This paper presents Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) to solve the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem with and without renewable energy sources. WCA has been tested on IEEE 30, 57, and 118-bus transmission networks to find minimum fuel cost. Main parameters of WCA have been set to different values for surveying the real performance and the best settings of the parameters have led to better results than those of previous methods. In addition, the best appropriate parameters have also supported WCA in finding the best location of a Photovoltaic system (PVS) in the first network. WCA could reach less power loss than two other metaheuristics, especially reaching much less power loss than the case without PVS. Consequently, WCA with the most appropriate parameter settings is really a powerful search method in terms of quick convergence speed and high-quality global optimum for the OPF problem with large-scale power networks.