A Distributed Load Flow Solver for Smart Grid Applications

Abstract

The drastic increase of distributed energy resources has inspired the development of decentralized schemes that aim at mitigating the heavy computational burden of centralized control in active distribution grids. In this paper, a novel single-phase distributed load flow tool is developed, that enables the calculation of load flows using only local measurements and exchange of information between electrical neighbours. The Newton-Raphson method is used, with a distributed convex optimization algorithm that avoids the inversion of the Jacobian matrix of the power flow equations and provides a scalable solution. Results are provided that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.