Fast AC Power Flow Optimization using Difference of Convex Functions Programming

An effective means for analyzing the impact of novel operating schemes on power systems is time domain simulation, for example for investigating optimization-based curtailment of renewables to alleviate voltage violations. Traditionally, interior-point methods are used for solving the non-convex AC optimal power flow (OPF) problems arising in this type of simulation. This paper presents an alternative algorithm that better suits the simulation framework, because it can more effectively be warm-started, has linear computational and memory complexity in the problem size per iteration and globally converges to Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points with a linear rate if they exist. The algorithm exploits a difference-of-convex-functions reformulation of the OPF problem, which can be performed effectively. Numerical results are presented comparing the method to state-of-the-art OPF solver implementations in MATPOWER, leading to significant speedups compared to the latter.