Investigating the effect of Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) for voltage enhancement and transmission line losses mitigation

There has been a problem of voltage instability and increased power loss on transmission lines due to the ever increasing load growth. This work investigates the effect of Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) to mitigate power losses and enhance voltage stability of a transmission system. To validate the capacity of STATCOM in this direction, a scaled model of IEEE 14 bus test system was built on DIgSILENT PowerFactory v15. A power flow study using the Newton Raphson algorithms was adopted with and without STATCOM incorporated into the power system while considering four different scenarios, the simulation results are presented and discussed. It is noted that there was sufficient improvement in the new voltage profile obtained for the weak buses of the system, the active and reactive power losses was mitigated by 17.73% and 24.80% respectively when STATCOM was incorporated at normal load.