A Bi-Level Corrective Line Switching Model for Urban Power Grid Congestion Mitigation

Abstract

The fast urbanization process in developing countries creates an electricity load surge that poses serious congestion problems to the urban power grid (UPG). The current practice of system operators is to reconfigure the topological structure of the 110-kV high voltage distribution network (HVDN) in an attempt to adjust the load distribution and eliminate the UPG congestion. However, HVDN reconfiguration is a large scale, non-convex and non-linear optimization problem that is intractable to be solved in an efficient manner. In order to reduce the computing cost and overcome the difficulty in the solving process, new partition rules are proposed to divide the HVDN into multiple smaller regions. The topological structure of each region can be optimized either independently or interdependently based on the condition of the UPG. The solving process is modeled as a bi-level iterative line switching problem. At the upper level, the operational boundary (OB) of each regional HVDN is calculated based on a set of convex ACOPF constraints. At the lower level, the line switching scheme of each regional HVDN is derived based on the corresponding mixed integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP) model considering the OB. Then, the line switching result is examined by the AC power flow to identify whether there is any violation or not. This iterative process continues until all the violations are corrected in the UPG. The proposed method was validated by a modified IEEE 58-node test system and a practical 157-node UPG system. The simulation results showed that the proposed method is able to achieve a higher computational efficiency than the traditional method so it is promising for online applications.