SELECTION OF BUSES FOR DETAILED MODELING IN LOAD FLOW STUDIES

ABSTRACT Conventional load flow solutions are carried out assuming that the active and reactive power requirements at all load buses are independent of the voltage magnitude at the corresponding bus. While this approach yields satisfactory results in most practical cases, it has been shown that detailed modeling of the load variation with voltage may be necessary to obtain realistic load flow results. From a theoretical point of view, it appears that detailed modelling at all load buses in an electric network may be the answer. Realizing the impracticality of this proposition, the paper presents a summary, of research work carried out to examine the improvements obtained via detailed modeling of loads in a number of test systems. From our experimentation we have found that it is only necessary to deal with only a few key buses in terms of detailed modeling. The paper deals with the problem of finding criteria for selecting such buses. The concept of significance factors is introduced and provides such a c...