Inclusion of Reactive Power into Ecological Robustness-Oriented Optimal Power Flow for Enhancing Power System Resilience

Traditional optimal power flow problems focus on minimizing the operational cost which can result in a fragile system during unexpected contingencies. An ecological robustness-oriented optimal power flow (RECO OPF) problem has been proposed to incorporate ecosystems’ resilient characteristics into power system operations, enhancing their inherent resilience against multi-hazard contingencies. However, the formulation of RECO only considered real power flows but neglected reactive power flows. In this paper, we include reactive power into the formulation of RECO and propose a reactive power flow based RECO OPF (Q-RECO OPF) and an apparent power flow based RECO OPF (MVA-RECO OPF) to guide the distribution of power flows, respectively. By comparing a 200-bus system’s resilience against N-x contingencies using different OPF problems, we observe that both Q-based and MVA-based RECO OPF can provide a more resilient operating state.