This paper describes an application of evolutionary programming(EP) to reactive power optimization and voltage control of power systems.Some technical problems which conclude mutation sacle,fitness value and population size have been solved to make EP practical for solving the optimal power flow problems.The computational results with EP have been compared with those obtained from a conventional gradient based optimization method.The comparision shows that EP are better than conventional methods in dealing with the optimization of noncontinuous and nonsmooth funcnons.The EP show the ability to search for the global optimum in reactive optimization that has multiple optima.