Parametric Distribution Optimal Power Flow With Variable Renewable Generation

The output of renewable generation depends on the real-time weather conditions and changes rapidly; so the economic operating point of the power system varies over time. This paper aims to find the explicit mapping from variable renewable power to optimal power flow solutions. To this end, we propose a parametric distribution optimal power flow (P-DOPF) method, which gives the optimal dispatch strategy and power flow status as analytical functions of the renewable output. With the established distribution optimal power flow problem based on the relaxed Distflow model, the first step is to perform a global polyhedral approximation on the second-order cone constraints to develop a linearized formulation. The second step is to obtain the P-DOPF model by treating renewable power output as parameters; then, the P-DOPF problem gives rise to a multi-parametric linear program (mp-LP). Third, we prove that the optimal solution and optimal value of the P-DOPF are piecewise linear functions of the parameters and we design an adaptive-sampling algorithm to construct the optimal value and optimal solution functions, as well as the partition of the parameter set, subject to a given error tolerance; this algorithm is not influenced by model degeneracy, a common difficulty of existing mp-LP algorithms. The P-DOPF framework provides an explicit real-time control policy of generators in response to the renewable output. Case studies on the IEEE 33 and 69-bus systems verify the effectiveness and performance of the proposed method; by comparison, the proposed method outperforms the established affine policy method in computational efficiency and optimality by 24.5% and 4.62%, respectively.