Decomposing Transmission Constraints for Decentralized Power System Optimization (Video)

One of the most complicating factors in decentralized optimization for power systems is the modeling of power flow equations. Existing formulations for direct current (or DC) power flows either have limited scalability or are very dense and unstructured, making them unsuitable for large-scale decentralized studies. In this work, we present a novel DC power flow formulation, based on sparsified injection shift factors, which has a decomposable block-diagonal structure, scales well for large systems, and can efficiently handle N-1 security requirements. Benchmarks on Multi-Zonal Security-Constrained Unit Commitment problems show that the proposed formulation can reliably and efficiently solve instances with up to 6,515 buses, with no convergence or numerical issues.