Weather-Dependent Power Flow Algorithm for Accurate Power System Analysis Under Variable Weather Conditions

Accurate power flow analysis is essential to system operators for planning, design, analysis, and control of power networks. The accuracy of power flow analysis can be increased significantly by including the weather-dependent characteristics of the system. In this paper, a novel weather-dependent power flow algorithm is proposed and studied in comparison to the very well-known conventional power flow. The weather-dependent power flow algorithm is novel in the sense that it is explicitly parameterized in terms of typically available measured weather parameters (ambient temperature, solar irradiance, wind speed, and wind angle) to perform a fully coupled weather-dependent power flow analysis. Using this algorithm, the IEEE 30-bus power network was studied utilizing real weather data by performing three year-long steady-state time-series power flow analyses. The study demonstrates that the proposed weather-dependent power flow algorithm accurately estimates the branch resistances, the system states (current and voltages), the power losses, the branch flows, and the branch loadings. These are made possible because the proposed algorithm accurately estimates branch conductor temperature due to the coupling of power flow with the nonlinear heat balance model. An analysis of the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is also presented.