Ineffective control actions in OPF problems: Identification, suppression and security aspects

This paper tackles the topic of identifying and suppressing ineffective control actions in optimal power flow (OPF) and security-constrained OPF (SCOPF) problems. Conventional approaches offer transmission system operators (TSOs) low-transparency, purely academic solutions containing dozens of control actions; inferring their contribution to the overarching objective is challenging. Our 3-step methodology helps TSOs to understand the value of each control action. TSOs are informed of their ideal system costs (Step 1), plus the minimum number of required control actions (Step 2), thus gaining the ability to identify and subsequently suppress those deemed inefficient, i.e., whose elimination minimally impacts the objective (Step 3). Major contributions with respect to previous works include (a) the consideration of all types of contingencies and control actions, (b) the leveraging of the methodology to the SCOPF setting, including multiple suppression mentalities for identifying control actions, and (c) the further showcasing of the academia-industry gap in a topic that is relatively obscure in academia but crucial in industry. We prominently demonstrate that conventional solutions include dozens of redundant control actions which TSOs could reliably filter out. We adopt a predominantly industrial viewpoint, our end-goal being to provide results that are easier to interpret in real-world conditions.