The separation of the businesses of generation and transmission has had a s
ignificant effect on the requirements for reactive power support in relatio
n to the provision of system security. There is a need to identify the syst
em-related value of reactive power support and voltage regulation services
provided by generators and other reactive compensation plant. This leads to
the problem of allocating system reactive requirements among the existing
plant, in addition to identifying the location, amount and type of new VARs
. In turn, this imposes some new challenges for the existing tools for VAR
capacity allocation, in terms of modelling, the number of variables and con
straints, and the problem's overall complexity. The paper discusses some im
plementation issues and presents computational experience of the applicatio
n of the Benders decomposition technique to a 'green field' security-constr
ained allocation of reactive support.