A Sensitivity-Based Three-Phase Weather-Dependent Power Flow Approach for Networks with Local Controllers—PART II: Case Studies

Power flow is an integral part of distribution system planning, monitoring, operation, and analysis. This two-part paper proposes a sensitivity-based three-phase weather-dependent power flow approach for accurately simulating distribution networks with local voltage controllers (LVC). This part II, firstly, presents simulation results of the proposed approach in an 8-Bus and 7-Bus network, which are validated using dynamic simulation. Secondly, simulation results for the IEEE 8500-node network are also presented. An extensive comparison is conducted between the proposed sensitivity-based approach and the other existing power flow approaches with respect to result accuracy and convergence speed. Moreover, the influence of weather and magnetic effects on the power flow results and the LVC states is also investigated. Simulation results confirm that the proposed sensitivity-based approach produces more accurate results than the existing approaches since it considers the actual switching sequence of LVCs as well as the weather and magnetic effects on the network. Moreover, the proposed algorithm exhibits accelerated convergence due to the usage of the sensitivity parameters, which makes it an important tool for distribution system analysis.