A competitive swarm optimizer with local search for solving optimal reactive power dispatch of wind farm

A technical and economic analysis of the doubly fed induction generator-based wind farm is established. The active power loss and levelized cost of energy minimization, sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation are considered. Furthermore, we develop a competitive swarm optimizer with local search (LSCSO) to solve the optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) problem. The proposed method adopts a novel velocity update strategy to update the position of particle, which can effectively improve the convergence efficiency. Apart from this, a local search mechanism is designed to enhance the global search ability. By this way, we can simultaneously search in multiple directions in the objective space. Based on these two designs, the proposed LSCSO approach can be efficiently applied to solve ORPD problem and obtains promising results. For a quantitative evaluation, a wind farm with a total installed capacity of 100 MW is chosen to test the proposed method and other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves advanced accuracy and performs competitively in solving problems of the wind farm. Given both good performance and nice properties, the suggested method can bring a technical efficiency and profitability way to make efficient decisions for managers.