2017 Reports

Variance-Aware Optimal Power Flow: addressing the trade-off between cost, security and variability

Bienstock, Daniel; Shukla, Apurv

Recent work has studied modifications to DC-OPF computations so as to better account for risk arising as a result of stochastic variation in the output of renewable sources. Typically such modifications rely on mathematical constructs such as chance-constraints that can still yield convex formulations. However, numerical simulations show that the computed policies can translate into power flow patterns with high variance. We introduce a number of convex variants of OPF that trade-off variance and cost minimization, describe practical algorithms for the solution of such problems, and present numerical experiments.