NETWORK OPTIMIZATION-BASED REACTIVE POWER MARGIN CALCULATION

Abstract This paper proposes a method to compute the maximal reactive power load which can be consumed at a given set of buses, subject to a set of operating constraints, involving for instance generator reactive production and bus voltage limits. It can be used in particular to determine margins with respect to voltage collapse or, more generally, with respect to unsatisfactory operation. An eKcie11t decoupling procedure allows solving a reactive power/voltage only problem. The optimization is performed by means of the Newton method and fully exploits sparsity. It is illustrated by several numerical examples.