Network Partition for Distributed Reactive Power Optimization in Power Systems

Reactive power optimization is an important measure to improve the secure and economic performance of power systems. To reduce the dimension of solution space and solve the time-consuming problem more effectively, a network partition method for distributed reactive power optimization is introduced to divide a large-scale power system into several small-scale subsystems. The voltage response of nodes to the perturbation of various reactive power resources is calculated in the partition method. And a new electrical distance is worked out in the method, which combines the network topology information with the voltage response. The alpha decomposition algorithm is used to cluster nodes in power systems. Some supplements based on divided subsystems for distributed reactive power optimization are represented after network partition. The simulation of a practical system verifies that the reasonable and effective results can be obtained using the proposed partition method.