<![CDATA[The purpose of this research is to study optimal size and placement of shunt capacitor in order to minimize line loss. Derivative load bus voltage was calculated to determine the sensitive load buses which further being optimum with the placement of shunt capacitor. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) was demonstrated on the IEEE 14 bus power system to find optimum size of shunt capacitor in reducing line loss. The objective function was applied to determine the proper placement of capacitor and get satisfied solutions towards constraints. The simulation was run over Matlab under two scenarios namely base case and increasing 100% load. Derivative load bus voltage was simulated to determine the most sensitive load bus. PSO was carried out to determine the optimum sizing of shunt capacitor at the most sensitive bus. The results have been determined that the most sensitive bus was bus number 14 for the base case and increasing 100% load. The optimum sizing was 8.17 Mvar for the base case and 23.98 Mvar for increasing load about 100%. Line losses were able to reduce approximately 0.98% for the base case and increasing 100% load reduced about 3.16%. The proposed method was also proven as a better result compared with harmony search algorithm (HSA) method. HSA method recorded loss reduction ratio about 0.44% for the base case and 2.67% when the load was increased by 100% while PSO calculated loss reduction ratio about 1.12% and 4.02% for the base case and increasing 100% load respectively. The result of this study will support the previous study and it is concluded that PSO was successfully able to solve some engineering problems as well as to find a solution in determining shunt capacitor sizing on the power system simply and accurately compared with other evolutionary optimization methods.]]>
