New auxiliary variable-based ADMM for nonconvex AC OPF

•Distributed computing of nonconvex AC OPF through consensus ADMM.•Developed a new information exchange scheme or new auxiliary variable to achieve better convergence.•The proposed scheme is compared with a scheme proposed in the literature and shows improvement in convergence.•The proposed ADMM algorithm is tested for power grids with sizes ranges from 30 buses to 1354 buses.•Robust performance is demonstrated for the partitioning algorithm based on graph spectral clustering.