Optimal power flow using an extended conic quadratic formulation

Recent research has shown that the load flow equations describing the steady-state conditions in a meshed network can be placed in extended conic quadratic (ECQ) format. This paper presents a study of the implementation of the new load flow equations format in an optimal power flow (OPF) program which accounts for control devices such as tap-changing transformers, phase-shifting transformers, and unified power flow controllers. The proposed OPF representation retains the advantages of the ECQ format: 1) it can be easily integrated within optimization routines that require the evaluation of second-order derivatives, 2) it can be efficiently solved for using primal-dual interior-point methods, and 3) it can make use of linear programming scaling techniques for improving numerical conditioning. The ECQ-OPF program is employed to solve the economic dispatch and active power loss minimization problems. Numerical testing is used to validate the proposed approach by comparing against solution methods and results of standard test systems.