Optimal Transmission Congestion Management by Means of Substation Reconfiguration

In power systems, congestion management is one of the important tasks of system operators. To eliminate or reduce congestion, several actions can be taken by system operatorranging from generation rescheduling to load shedding if required. It is known that transmission switching can be used forsystem configuration, and consequently, change power flows through the lines as a means of relieving congestion. In this paper, in order to mitigate network congestion, substation busbarreconfiguration as a powerful tool is employed to change network topology, consequently, leading to lower energy pricesand better competition in the market. The presented method is capable in processing complex substation configurations. The proposed approach and formulation applies Benders decomposition to separate DC optimal power flow (DCOPF) problem with binary variables from the network AC securitycheck and thus increasing convergence and robustness of the solution. Test results for the IEEE 14-bus system illustrate theaccuracy and performance of the reconfiguration model for removing congestion.

Keywords:

congestion , substation reconfiguration , master problem , AC constraints check subproblem