A new method for finding low-voltage power flow solutions

Some techniques for analyzing power system voltage stability use alternative power flow solutions to compute their measure. These alternative solutions usually exhibit low bus voltage magnitudes at a subset of the system's nodes. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as "low-voltage" power flow solutions. The fractal convergence regions exhibited by the Newton-Raphson power flow makes finding low-voltage solutions difficult, because it complicates the task of identifying an initial voltage guess that leads to the desired solutions. This paper derives a new approach for finding low-voltage power flow solutions directly from the structure of the Newton-Raphson power flow equations in rectangular coordinates. It compares the speed and frequency of convergence of the new technique with a previously proposed method to demonstrate its effectiveness in finding low-voltage solutions.