Transmission congestion solutions by optimal power flow and load management

Deregulation of power industry creates big challenges to the operation of a transmission system due to the physical limits of the system. One of the challenges is transmission congestion management. Transmission congestion can not only pose a physical threat to the system security but also can result in severe economic problems such as price volatility. In particular, when customers within a congested area cannot flexibly reduce their consumption, they may suffer from extremely high prices. The economic benefit of deregulation can, therefore, be reduced by a large extent. To avoid the system security problems and the reduction of economic benefit of the deregulated system, an effective approach to solve the transmission congestion problem is presented in this thesis. In the proposed solution, one load customer was chosen to lower its consumption of electricity when congestion occurs. Three indices are used to decide who will be this customer and how much load curtailment is required. At the same time, to keep the balance of the power within the entire system, a generation redispatch procedure is also suggested by using a similar decision procedure. The proposed scheme is tested in simulation on modified IEEE 14 and 30 bus systems. The simulation results prove that the proposed solution effectively relieves congestion while taking into consideration physical and economic factors of the transmission system.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat