Tractable reserve scheduling in AC power systems with uncertain wind power generation

This paper presents a solution method for a day-ahead stochastic reserve scheduling (RS) problem using an AC optimal power flow (OPF) formulation. Such a problem is known to be non-convex and in general hard to solve. Existing approaches follow either linearized (DC) power flow or iterative approximation of nonlinearities, which may lead to either infeasibility or computational intractability. In this paper we present two new ideas to address this problem. We first develop an algorithm to determine the level of reserve requirements using vertex enumeration (VE) on the deviation of wind power scenarios from its forecasted value. We provide a theoretical result on the level of reliability of a solution obtained using VE. Such a solution is then incorporated in RS-OPF problem to determine up-and down-spinning reserves by distributing among generators, and relying on the structure of constraint functions with respect to the uncertain parameters. As a second contribution, we use the sparsity pattern of the power system to reduce computational time complexity. We then provide a novel recovery algorithm to find a feasible solution for the RS-OPF problem from the partial solution which is guaranteed to be rank-one. The IEEE 30 bus system is used to verify theoretical developments together with a comparison with DC counterpart using Monte Carlo simulations.