Decoupled Economic Dispatch Using the Participation Factors Load Flow

This paper presents the concept of the participation factors load flow and applies it to the economic dispatch problem. The participation factors load flow consists of a load flow model where the quantities specified or controlled at the NG generation buses are the NG participation factors instead of NG-1 real generations. This formulation permits us to more realistically model the closed loop mode of generation dispatch used by control centers today. In contrast most modern economic dispatch algorithms based on the conventional load flow produce an open loop dispatch which cannot be directly implemented in the closed loop participation factors dispatch mode without additional computations. The numeric and analytic properties of this new load flow formulation are very similar to those of the conventional load flow with one significant difference, a slack bus need not be defined, a property which has various advantages. The new model permits the development of a decoupled economic dispatch scheme which directly computes the participation factors and separates the dispatching of real power quantities quite naturally from reactive power, voltage variables and transformer parameters.