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Differential evolution (DE) is a promising evolutionary algorithm for solving optimal reactive power flow problems, but it requires relatively large population to avoid premature convergence. In order to overcome this disadvantage, a novel decomposition and coordination method based on the cooperative co-evolutionary architecture and the voltage-var sensitivity-based power system decomposition technique is proposed and incorporated with DE in this paper. It is implemented with a three-level parallel computing topology on a PC-cluster. Based on the IEEE 118-bus system test case, the effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified by comparison with the parallel basic DE not using the decomposition and coordination technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]