Economic operation and planning of multi-area interconnected power systems

Optimal power flow (OPF) for both operations and planning has been exhaustively dealt with over the last few decades. In large interconnected systems, local area optimization is more desirable for speedier solutions, while the optimization of a large interconnected system in order to solve a local area problem is unnecessary. In this paper, an optimization tool to solve either the operations or the planning problem using partitioned area optimization is presented. Its features also include automatic selection of the objective for each local area and the facility to select constraints from specified set. The quadratic interior point method extended to handle nonlinear constraints is used in the optimization. It is concluded that the OPF package described in this paper handles in one environment, many issues that are not commonly dealt with in most available OFF programs. Its production grade version incorporating the Bonneville Power Administration power flow (BPAPF) will be a very useful tool to the power industry