Towards reactive power dispatch within a wind farm using hybrid PSO

•OLTC tap as obtained by IPM if rounded to nearest tap can cause voltage constraint violations.•Hence IPM requires three rounds for finding the best solution.•However, PSO has solution in one round.•The execution time for each single run by IPM is around 30–45 s and by HPSO is 50 s.•HPSO is accurate, robust under all operating conditions than IPM method.

With the increasing penetration of wind power generation, the stringent grid codes are imposed by the system operators insisting the wind turbines to behave similar to that of synchronous generators. As a part of fulfilling the grid code in terms of steady state reactive power injection at point of common coupling, in this research work, the problem of optimal reactive power dispatch within a wind farm is formulated and a hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed to get the optimal solution. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested by simulations of the power collection grid of practical off-shore wind farm. The test results are compared with interior-point method based non-linear constrained optimization tool, fmincon, in Matlab. The analysis is carried out considering with and without wake effects on the wind farm at various grid bus voltage conditions. The test results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving optimal solution for various operating conditions.