Load Flow Analysis for Transient Stability Studies of Nigerian 132kV Power Transmission Network using Artificial Bee Colony

Load Flow Analysis (LFA) represents an important and first step to determining the optimal network states of a power system prior to transient stability analysis (TSA). Existing LFA solutions or soft programs for TSA problems such as Newton-Raphson and Gauss-Seidel techniques have been successful in the solution of a number of power networks; however, when the initial power network states are ill defined or there is high transmission loading, these solutions fail to converge and hence cannot be used as a TSA state variable pre-solver. In this paper, we propose a swarm optimized LFA solution for optimally finding the network states of a power system network which in turn is used for performing transient stability studies on some buses in a section of the Nigerian 132kV power transmission network Port-Harcourt Region considering single phase line to ground faults. The results of simulation show that critical stability limits (critical clearance time) of the system is about 0.4s; thus, circuit breakers should break earlier than this time to secure the interconnected power system.