Earth fault in substations is one of the most serious safety concerns in the power industry. In order to forestall this menace an earthing grid is always installed in all substations. The installed earthing grid must be efficient and reliable. In this paper an earthing grid was design with efficiency, reliability and safety in mind. To achieve this, the firefly algorithm was used in the mesh voltage minimization which leads to the optimal design of substation earthing grid. The earthing grid square configuration parameters such as number of parallel conductors, conductor spacing, and length of grid conductor, the number of earth rod and length of earth rod were taken as output variables. The output values of the firefly optimization process were validated with the results obtained using genetic algorithm and ETAP’s earthing module written in IEEE std 80-2000 format.

Full text: IJEIR_991_Final.pdf