Distributionally Robust Chance Constrained Optimal Power Flow with Renewables: A Conic Reformulation

The uncertainty associated with renewable energy sources introduces significant challenges in optimal power flow (OPF) analysis. A variety of new approaches have been proposed that use chance constraints to limit line or bus overload risk in OPF models. Most existing formulations assume that the probability distributions associated with the uncertainty are known a priori or can be estimated accurately from empirical data, and/or use separate chance constraints for upper and lower line/bus limits. In this paper, we propose a data driven distributionally robust chance constrained optimal power flow model (DRCC-OPF), which ensures that the worst-case probability of violating both the upper and lower limit of a line/bus capacity under a wide family of distributions is small. Assuming that we can estimate the first and second moments of the underlying distributions based on empirical data, we propose an exact reformulation of DRCC-OPF as a tractable convex program. The key theoretical result behind this reformulation is a second-order cone programming (SOCP) reformulation of a general two-sided distributionally robust chance constrained set by lifting the set to a higher dimensional space. Our numerical study shows that the proposed SOCP formulation can be solved efficiently and that the results of our model are quite robust.