Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Formulated as Quadratic OPF and Solved via CS-SLP

Increased penetration of inverter interfaced renewable energy resources creates challenges and opportunities for reactive power management in the modern electricity grid. Because of the multiplicity of new resources, new computational tools and optimization models are needed in formulating and solving the Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Problem (ORPD). In this paper, we propose (1) an object-oriented ORPD formulation based on high-fidelity modeling of each device in the network, especially those with VAR/V control capability and (2) a two-step Convex Solution-Sequential Linear Programming algorithm. The proposed method introduces two innovations: (a) high fidelity quadratized models of each component of the power system with emphasis on those components that have VAR/V control capability; and (b) an object oriented convexification of the resulting quadratic OPF problem; the solution is obtained by first solving the convex problem using public solvers for convex problems and them removing the relaxation and solving the original OPF using SLP, starting from the solution of the relaxed (convex) problem