Challenges to Optimal Power Flow

This paper is based on material presented at the IEEE 1995 Winter Power Meeting Panel Session on Challenges to OPF, sponsored by the IEEE Working Group on Operating Economics. The paper contains a brief summary of the session followed by summaries. INTRODUCTION J.A. Momob, Senior Member Howard University Washington, DC The increasing demand for an OPF tool for assessing state and recommended control actions for off-line and on-line studies has been on the increase since the first OPF paper was presented in the 60’s. The lack of uniformity in usage and definition has also been a source of challenge to developers/users in OPF. The increasing need for OPF to solve problems of today’s deregulated industry, and the unsolved problems in the vertically integrated industry has caused the working group on operating economics, through task force, challenges to OPF to evaluate the capabilities of existing OPF, in terms of their abilities. OPF has enjoyed the renewed interest in a variety of formulations, through the use of advanced optimized techniques such as, Genetic Algorithms, Interior Point methods, simulated annealing method, decomposition and Newton’s method, and their contributions have been significant. Several production grade software suites with a family of applications have been in the market place and various industry and research archives. Inspite of all the investment and work to date on OPF, several questions regarding what challenges are before OPF remain to be answered. 96 WM 312-9 PWRS A paper recommended and approved by the IEEE Power System Engineering Committee of the IEEE Power Engineering Society for presentation at the 1996 IEEE/PES Winter Meeting, January 2125, 1996, Baltimore, MD. Manuscript submitted August 1, 1995; made available for printing December21, 1995. 1. From a planner/operational perspective? Is OPF able to provide self diagnostic checks, guide a novice to use and give easy to understand answers and minimize the intimidation of the highly theoretical framework of non linearity, complexity, unfeasibility and optimality that are important to an optimization theorist? 2. What challenges exist to OPF in a more competitive environment? The deregulated electricity market will seek answers from OPF to address a variety of different types of market participants, data model requirements and real time processing and selection of appropriate costing for each unbundled service evaluation. 3. As a special purpose application in EMS environment? To cope with response time requirements, modeling of externalities (loop flow, environment and simultaneous transfers), practicality and sensitivity for on line use. 4. As a real time control application? How well the future OPF provide local or global control measures to support the impact of critical contingencies, which threaten system voltage and angle stability simulated. Future OPF has to address the gamut of operation and planning environment in providing new generation facilities, unbundled transmission services and other resource allocations. Finally, it has to be simple to use and portable and fast enough. Summaries of the presentations at the panel are presented herein to provide a working reference to needs and interest in OPF technology. AN OPF USER’S PERSPECTIVE Rodolfo J. Koessler, Senior Member Power Technologies, Inc., Schenectady, New York The future of OPFs is as bright as ever. Engineers continue to find new uses for those programs. However, they are still only used by a minority. Thus, the challenge to OPFs is to become as popular and as easy to use as conventional power flows. This note examines what power engineers are using off-line OPFs for, what shortcomings they are encountering, and what solutions there could be to these problems.