Abstract
During preliminary substation design, only minimal information is available to the designer. Substation bus arrangements have been defined in textbooks for their advantages and disadvantages. However, the exact level of superiority/inferiority of one design as compared to another is definitely unclear. In this project, a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) program imbedded in a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet has been developed to give a user easily comparable data. The program requires minimal user input and calculates three different metrics as well as an approximate cost comparison between the different Substation Bus Arrangement. The results are displayed numerically and on a graph for quick intuitive comparison. Although much of the results coincide with historical data, dramatic differences can be seen when different bus arrangements are compared. Tradeoffs between certain arrangements can be determined immediately and decisions on the correct bus arrangement choice can be made more easily.