A good substation grounding grid is essential to ensure safety of personnel working in the substation, and also to protect the equipment to ensure continuous operation of the substation. The design of the substation grounding grid is often carried out to meet the IEEE Std 80-2000 requirements of grounding resistance, touch voltage and step voltage at an economical cost. However, the conventional grounding grid design is normally over calculated to meets these IEEE requirements without considering the total cost. The grounding grid is often costly to implement due to high number of grounding conductors and rods, and large area size of the interconnected bare conductors. In this study, Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) and Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO) are proposed to achieve an effective grounding grid calculation. The reliability of these algorithms has been validated using a typical medium voltage substation grounding grid parameters. It was found both that GSA and PSO were capable to achieve a lower cost with of grounding grid with 29% cost saving as compared to the conventional calculation technique, without compromising the safety requirements of grounding grid.
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