The Valuation of Kron Reduction Application in Load Flow Methods

Abstract

The presence of new smart monitoring devices in the modern power system eases the operation of the system, and as a part of this, computational load flow calculations are becoming more present. Load flow calculations as a part of the smart grid monitoring systems have an important role in the real time calculations. Thus, their optimization is crucial, by making the calculation time as fast as possible, by using less hardware resources. One way to achieve this is to use the Kron reduction for node elimination in the load flow process. This paper analyses and compares the efficiency of the Kron reduction in different load flow methods. Results obtained from the developed real 10-bus, 17-bus and 50-bus systems show the efficiency of the Kron reduction applied on five different load flow methods. It is demonstrated that the proposed method is capable to significantly reduce the computational time and the number of load flow’s iterations. This paper makes a contribution to the existing body of knowledge by testing and comparing the Kron reduction effect on multiple load flow methods, whose application represents an improvement when compared to the operation of the standard load flow algorithms.