Homotopy-Enhanced Power Flow Methods for General Distribution Networks With Distributed Generators

The issue of power flow divergence when dispersed generations are modeled as P-V nodes needs to be addressed. To address this issue, this paper presents a homotopy-enhanced numerical power flow method. Several numerical aspects of the implementation were discussed. To evaluate its reliability and effectiveness, the proposed method is applied to several standard test systems, a practical 1101-node distribution network and the IEEE 8500-node test system. The evaluation results were very promising. In addition, one distinguished feature of the homotopy-enhanced numerical power flow method is that it is applicable to several existing power flow methods.