Tie-Line Power Transmission Region in a Hybrid Grid: Fast Characterization and Expansion Strategy

Abstract

The identification of a tie-line power transmission region is crucial for the secure operation of interconnected power grids. The characterization of a tie-line power transmission region with regional operational constraints is inherently a multi-parametric programming problem, which greatly suffers from a heavy computational burden. In this paper, we propose a fast boundary search approach to efficiently characterize the tie-line power transmission region in AC/DC hybrid grids. The multi-parametric programming method is improved in the following three aspects: (1) the search direction is fixed along the boundary of a region, which avoids the search inside a region; (2) the abundant search of subregions that share a boundary facet is avoided; and (3) a fast guess of the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition is presented, which reduces the number of optimization calculations. Furthermore, an expansion strategy is presented to enlarge the tie-line power transmission region via quantifying the impact of system parameters on the transmission region. Simulations based on the IEEE 118-bus test system and a 661-bus utility system show that (1) the proposed method can be over 30 times faster than existing methods and (2) the proposed method successfully expands the tie-line power transmission region by identifying the key parameters.