A Method to Calculate Charge for Reactive Power Service under Competition of Electric Power Utilities

As electric power systems have been moving from vertically integrated utilities to a deregulated environment, the charging of reactive power management is a new challenging them for market operators. This paper proposes a new methodology to compute the costs of providing reactive power management service in a competitive electrical power market. The proposed formulation, which is basically different from those shown in the literature, consists of two parts. One is to recover investment capital costs of reactive power supporting equipment based on a reactive power flow tracing algorithm. The other is to recover operational costs based on variable spot prices using the optimal power flow algorithm. The charging shapes resulted from the proposed approach exhibit a quite good meaning viewed from a practical sense. It turns out that reactive power charged are mostly due to recovery of capital costs and slightly due to recovery of operational costs. The methods can be useful in providing additional insight into power system operation and can be used to determined tariffs of a reactive power management service.