04/12/1433

Power System Analysis

Lecture 3:
Loadflow Analysis
References:
• Hadi Saadat, "Power System Analysis", McGraw-Hill,
2nd ed, 2004
• William D. Stevenson, "Elements of Power System Analysis", 4th
ed, McGraw-Hill, 1999

• Elgerd, Olle I. 1982. Electric Energy Systems Theory: An

Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill

• Anderson, Paul M., and Aziz A. Fouad. 1994. Power System

Stability and Control (Revised Printing). New York: IEEE Press.

Overview
• Load flow studies are one of the most important
aspects of power system planning and operation.
• The load flow gives us the sinusoidal steady state
of the entire system - voltages, real and reactive
power generated and absorbed and line losses.
• Since the load is a static quantity and it is the
power that flows through transmission lines, the
purists prefer to call this Power Flow studies
rather than load flow studies. We shall however
stick to the original nomenclature of load flow.

1
04/12/1433

• Through the load flow studies we can obtain the

voltage magnitudes and angles at each bus in the
steady state. This is rather important as the
magnitudes of the bus voltages are required to be
held within a specified limit.
• Once the bus voltage magnitudes and their angles
are computed using the load flow, the real and
reactive power flow through each line can be
computed. Also based on the difference between
power flow in the sending and receiving ends, the
losses in a particular line can also be computed.
• Furthermore, from the line flow we can also
determine the over and under load conditions.

2
04/12/1433

I: Real And Reactive Power Injected in a Bus:

For the formulation of the real and reactive power entering a b
us, we need to define the following quantities. Let the voltage
at the i th bus be denoted by: (1)
Also let us define the self admittance at bus i as
(2)
Similarly the mutual admittance between the buses i and j
can be written as:
(3)
Let the power system contains a total number of n buses. The
current injected at bus i is given as
(4)

It is to be noted; we shall assume the current entering a

bus to be positive and that leaving the bus to be negative.
As a consequence the power and reactive power entering
a bus will also be assumed to be positive. The complex
power at bus i is then given by

(5)

3
04/12/1433

Note that

(6)

Therefore substituting in (5) we get the real and reactive

power as

(7)

(8)

2. : Classification Of Buses
• The main objective of the load flow is to find the voltage
magnitude of each bus and its angle when the powers
generated and loads are pre-specified.
• It is further assumed that the generator terminal voltages
are tightly regulated and therefore are constant.
• To facilitate this we classify the different buses of the power
system shown in the chart below.

In the next slide we'll discuss them in details

4
04/12/1433

Load Buses :
• In these buses no generators are connected and hence
the generated real power PGi and reactive power QGi are
taken as zero.
• The load drawn by these buses are defined by real
power -PLi and reactive power -QLi in which the negative
sign accommodates for the power flowing out of the
bus. This is why these buses are sometimes referred to
as P-Q bus.
• The objective of the load flow is to find the bus voltage
magnitude |Vi| and its angle δi.

Voltage Controlled Buses :

• These are the buses where generators are connected.
Therefore the power generation in such buses is
controlled through a prime mover while the terminal
voltage is controlled through the generator excitation.
• Keeping the input power constant through turbine-
governor control and keeping the bus voltage constant
using automatic voltage regulator, we can specify
constant PGi and | Vi | for these buses. This is why such
buses are also referred to as P-V buses.
• It is to be noted that the reactive power supplied by the
generator QGi depends on the system configuration and
cannot be specified in advance. Furthermore we have to
find the unknown angle δi of the bus voltage.

5
04/12/1433

Slack or Swing Bus :

• Usually this bus is numbered 1 for the load flow studies.
• This bus sets the angular reference for all the other buses.
• Since it is the angle difference between two voltage sources
that dictates the real and reactive power flow between
them, the particular angle of the slack bus is not important.
• However it sets the reference against which angles of all the
other bus voltages are measured. For this reason the angle
of this bus is usually chosen as 0° . Furthermore it is
assumed that the magnitude of the voltage of this bus is
known.
The generator bus is usually chosen as the slack bus
without specifying its real power. It is assumed that the
generator connected to this bus will supply the balance of
the real power required and the line losses.

Load Flow

Bus Types Summary:

Bus Type Known Unknown

Parameters Parameters
Swing Bus(slack) V &  (V=1<0o) P, Q

Load Bus(Gen Bus) P & Q V, 

(Voltage Control) V, P Q, 

6
04/12/1433

3. : Preparation Of Data For Load Flow

Let real and reactive power generated at bus- i be denoted by
PGi and QGi respectively. Also let us denote the real and
reactive power consumed at the i th th bus by PLi and QLi
respectively. Then the net real power injected in bus- i is
(8)
Let the injected power calculated by the load flow program be
Pi, calc . Then the mismatch between the actual injected and
calculated values is given by
(9)
In a similar way the mismatch between the reactive power
injected and calculated values is given by
(10)

• The purpose of the load flow is to minimize the

above two mismatches.
• It is to be noted that (7) and (8) are used for the
calculation of real and reactive power in (9) and
(10).
• However since the magnitudes of all the voltages
and their angles are not known a priori, an iterative
procedure must be used to estimate the bus
voltages and their angles in order to calculate the
mismatches.
• It is expected that mismatches ΔPi and ΔQi reduce
with each iteration and the load flow is said to have
converged when the mismatches of all the buses
become less than a very small number

7
04/12/1433

• For the load flow studies we shall consider the

system of Fig. 1, which has 2 generator and 3 load
buses.
• We define bus-1 as the slack bus while taking bus-
5 as the P-V bus(Generator bus). Buses 2, 3 and 4
are P-Q buses(Load buses).

Fig. 1 The simple

power system used
for load flow studies

• The line impedances and the line charging admittances are

given in Table 1. Based on this data the Y bus matrix is given
in Table 2.
Line Impedance Line
(bus to charging
bus) ( Y /2)
1-2 0.02 + j 0.10 j 0.030
1-5 0.05 + j 0.25 j 0.020
2-3 0.04 + j 0.20 j 0.025
2-5 0.05 + j 0.25 j 0.020
3-4 0.05 + j 0.25 j 0.020
3-5 0.08 + j 0.40 j 0.010 Fig. 1.
4-5 0.10 + j 0.50 j 0.075
Table 1 Line impedance and line
charging data of the system of
Fig. 1.

8
04/12/1433

• It is to be noted here that the sources and their internal

impedances are not considered while forming the Ybus
matrix for load flow studies which deal only with the bus
voltages
• Based on this data the Y bus matrix is given in Table 2.
1 2 3 4 5
1 2.6923 - j 13.4115 - 1.9231 + j 9.6154 0 0 - 0.7692 + j 3.8462

2 - 1.9231 + j 9.6154 3.6538 - j 18.1942 - 0.9615 + j 4.8077 0 - 0.7692 + j 3.8462

3 0 - 0.9615 + j 4.8077 2.2115 - j 11.0027 - 0.7692 + j 3.8462 - 0.4808 + j 2.4038

4 0 0 - 0.7692 + j 3.8462 1.1538 - j 5.6742 - 0.3846 + j 1.9231

5 - 0.7692 + j 3.8462 - 0.7692 + j 3.8462 - 0.4808 + j 2.4038 - 0.3846 + j 1.9231 2.4038 - j 11.8942

• The bus voltage magnitudes, their angles, the power

generated and consumed at each bus are given in Table 3.
• In this table some of the voltages and their angles are
given in boldface letters. This indicates that these are
initial data used for starting the load flow program.

Table 3 Bus voltages, power generated and load - initial data

Bus Bus voltage Power Load
no. generated
Magnitude Angle P Q P P
(pu) (deg) (MW) (MVAr) (MW) (MVAr)
1 1.05 0 - - 0 0
2 1 0 0 0 96 62
3 1 0 0 0 35 14
4 1 0 0 0 16 8
5 1.02 0 48 - 24 11

9
04/12/1433

• The power and reactive power generated at the slack bus

and the reactive power generated at the P-V bus are
unknown.
• Therefore each of these quantities are indicated by a dash
( - ). Since we do not need these quantities for our load
flow calculations, their initial estimates are not required.
• Also note from Fig. 1 that the slack bus does not contain
any load while the P-V bus 5 has a local load and this is
indicated in the load column.
Bus no. Bus voltage Power generated Load
Magnitude Angle P (MW) Q P (MW) P
(pu) (deg) (MVAr) (MVAr)
1 1.05 0 - - 0 0
2 1 0 0 0 96 62
3 1 0 0 0 35 14
4 1 0 0 0 16 8
5 1.02 0 48 - 24 11

Gauss-Seidel method GS

Basic Procedure:

- Algebraically solve each linear equation for xi

- Assume an initial guess solution array

- Solve for each xi and repeat

- Use absolute relative approximate error after each

iteration to check if error is within a pre-specified
tolerance.

10
04/12/1433

Algorithm
A set of n equations and n
unknowns:
a11x1  a12x2  a13x3  ...  a1n xn  b1
a21x1  a22 x2  a23x3  ...  a2n xn  b2
an1x1  an 2 x2  an3 x3  ...  ann xn  bn
. .
. .
. .
• Provided that the diagonal elements are non-zero
• Rewrite each equation solving for the corresponding
unknown
ex: From First equation, solve for x1
From Second equation, solve for x2 etc……

a11x1  a12x2  a13x3  ...  a1n xn  b1

Rewriting each equation for x gives

c1  a12 x2  a13 x3   a1n xn
x1  From Equation 1
a11
c2  a21x1  a23 x3   a2 n xn
x2  From equation 2
a22
  
cn 1  an 1,1 x1  an 1, 2 x2   an 1,n  2 xn  2  an 1,n xn
xn 1  From equation n-1
an 1,n 1
cn  an1 x1  an 2 x2    an,n 1 xn 1 From equation n
xn 
ann

11
04/12/1433

General Forms for previous equations

n
c1   a1 j x j
n

j 1
cn 1  a
j 1
n 1, j xj
j 1
x1  xn 1 
j  n 1
a11 an 1,n 1

n
c n   a nj x j
n
c2   a2 j x j
j 1 j 1
j 2 j n
x2  xn 
a 22 a nn

General Form for any row ‘i’

n
ci   aij x j
j 1
j i
xi  , i  1,2,, n.
aii
This equation be used as follows:  x1 
x 
Assume an initial guess for [X] as:  2
  
 
Then Solve for the unknowns  xn -1 
 xn 
Use rewritten equations to solve for
each value of xi.

12
04/12/1433

Important: Remember to use the most recent value

of xi. Which means to apply values calculated to the
calculations remaining in the current iteration.

Calculate the Absolute Relative Approximate Error

xinew  xiold
a i  100
xinew

So when has the answer been found?

The iterations are stopped when the absolute relative
approximate error is less than a pre-specified
tolerance for all unknowns.

Example 1
Given the system of equations
12 x1  3x2- 5x3  1
x1  5x2  3x3  28
3x1  7 x2  13x3  76
find the solution for x1, x2 & x3 using the Gauss-
Siedel method? With an initial guess of x
 1  
1
 x   0 
 2  
 x3  1

12 3  5
Solution: The coefficient matrix is: A   1 5 3 
 3 7 13 

13
04/12/1433

12 3  5  a1   1 
 1 5 3  a   28
Rewriting each equation    2  
 3 7 13  a 3  76

 x1  1
With an initial guess of  x   0 
 2  
As follows:  x3  1

1  3 x 2  5 x3 1  30  51
x1  x1   0.50000
12 12

28  x1  3x3 28  0.5  31

x2  x2   4.9000
5 5

76  3x1  7 x2 76  30.50000  74.9000

x3  x3   3.0923
13 13

The absolute relative approximate error

0.50000  1.0000
a 1  100  100.00%
0.50000
4.9000  0
a 2  100  100.00%
4.9000

3.0923  1.0000
a 3  100  67.662%
3.0923

The maximum absolute relative error after the first

iteration is 100%

14
04/12/1433

After Iteration #1
 x1  0.5000
 x   4.9000
 2  
 x3  3.0923
Substituting the new x values into the
equations for second iteration gives:
1  34.9000  53.0923
x 
1  0.14679
12 After Iteration #2
28  0.14679  33.0923
x2   3.7153
5  x1  0.14679
 x    3.7153 
76  30.14679  74.900  2  
x3   3.8118
13  x3   3.8118 

Iteration #2 absolute relative approximate error

0.14679  0.50000
a 1  100  240.61%
0.14679
3.7153  4.9000
a 2  100  31.889%
3.7153
3.8118  3.0923
a 3  100  18.874%
3.8118
The maximum absolute relative error after the
second iteration is 240.61%

15
04/12/1433

Repeating more iterations, the following values

are obtained

Iteration x1 a 1 % x2 a 2 % x3 a 3 %

1 0.50000 100.00 4.9000 100.00 3.0923 67.662

2 0.14679 240.61 3.7153 31.889 3.8118 18.876
3 0.74275 80.236 3.1644 17.408 3.9708 4.0042
4 0.94675 21.546 3.0281 4.4996 3.9971 0.65772
5 0.99177 4.5391 3.0034 0.82499 4.0001 0.074383
6 0.99919 0.74307 3.0001 0.10856 4.0001 0.00101

The solution obtained is close to the exact solution of x

solution obtained exact solution

 x1  0.99919  x1  1 
 x    3.0001   x    3
 2    2  
 x3   4.0001   x3  4

Gauss-Seidel method disadvantages:

• Comparably slow convergence rate
• matrix is sparse and can’t be inverted
• Usually solve for linear power system
1. Loadflow Using Gauss-Seidel Method (GS)
steps for Iteration:
1. Create a bus admittance matrix Ybus for the power
system;
2. Make an initial estimate for the voltages at each bus in
the system;
3. Update the voltage estimate for each bus (one at a time),
based on the estimates for the voltages and power flows
at every other bus and the values of the bus admittance
matrix.

16
04/12/1433

3. Since the voltage at a given bus depends on the

voltages at all of the other busses in the system
(which are just estimates), the updated voltage will
not be correct. However, it will usually be closer to
the answer than the original guess.
4. Repeat this process to make the voltages at each
bus approaching the correct answers closer and
closer.
5. The equations used to update the estimates differ
for different types of busses. Each bus in a power
system can be describe by its own equations
according to its type.

4. : Load Flow by Gauss-Seidel Method cont.

•Updating Load Bus Voltages
•Updating P-V Bus Voltages
•Convergence of the Algorithm
• The basic power flow equations (6) and (7) are nonlinear.
(6)

(7)

• In an n -bus power system, let the number of P-Q buses

(load) be np and the number of P-V (generator) buses be
ng such that n = np + ng + 1.
• Both voltage magnitudes and angles of the P-Q buses
and voltage angles of the P-V buses are unknown making
a total number of 2np + ng quantities to be determined.

17
04/12/1433

• Amongst the known quantities are 2np numbers

of real and reactive powers of the P-Q buses, 2ng
numbers of real powers and voltage magnitudes
of the P-V buses and voltage magnitude and
angle of the slack bus Vslack; .
• Therefore there are sufficient numbers of known
quantities to obtain a solution of the load flow
problem.
• However, it is rather difficult to obtain a set of
closed form equations from (6) and (7).
• We therefore have to resort to obtain iterative
solutions of the load flow problem.

• At the beginning of an iterative method, a set of

values for the unknown quantities are chosen.
• These are then updated at each iteration.
• The process continues till errors between all the
known and actual quantities reduce below a pre-
specified value. k
• In the Gauss-Seidel load flow we denote the
initial voltage of the i th bus by Vi(0) , i = 2, ... , n .
This should read as the voltage of the i th bus at
the 0th iteration, or initial guess.
• Similarly this voltage after the first iteration will
be denoted by Vi(1) .

18
04/12/1433

• In this Gauss-Seidel load flow the load buses and

voltage controlled buses are treated differently.
• However in both these type of buses we use the
complex power equation given in (5 see 11 below)
for updating the voltages.
• Knowing the real and reactive power injected at
any bus we can expand (5) as
(11)

We can rewrite (11) as

(12)

• In this fashion the voltages of all the buses are updated.

19
04/12/1433

• We shall outline (demonstrate) this procedure with the

help of the system of Fig. 1, with the system data given in
Tables 1 to 3.
• It is to be noted that the real and reactive powers are
given respectively in MW and MVAr. However they are
converted into per unit quantities where a base of 100
MVA is chosen

Updating Load Bus Voltages

• Let us start the procedure with bus-2 of the 5 bus 7
line system given in fig: 1
• Since this is load bus, both the real and reactive
power into this bus is known. We can therefore write
(13) from (12)
(12)

(13)

From the data given in Table 3 we can write

(14)

20
04/12/1433

• It is to be noted that since the real and reactive power is

drawn from this bus, both these quantities appear in the
above equation with a negative sign.
• With the values of the Y bus elements given in Table 2 we
get V21 = 0.9927 < − 2.5959°
The first iteration voltage of bus-3 is given by

(15)

• Note that in the above equation since the update for the
bus-2 voltage is already available, we used the 1st iteration
value of this rather than the initial value.
• Substituting the numerical data we get:
V3(1) = 0.9883 < − 2. 8258° .

Finally the bus-4 voltage is given by

Solving we get V4(1) = 0. 9968 < −3.4849°

Updating P-V Bus Voltages

• It can be seen from Table 3 that even though the real power
is specified for the P-V bus-5, its reactive power is unknown.
• Therefore to update the voltage of this bus, we must first
estimate the reactive power of this bus. Note from Fig. 1
that
(16)

21
04/12/1433

And hence we can write the kth iteration values as

(17)

For the system of Fig. 1 we have

(18)

• This is computed as 0.0899 per unit.

• Once the reactive power is estimated, the bus-5 voltage
is updated as

(19)

• It is to be noted that even though the power generation in

bus-5 is 48 MW, there is a local load that is consuming half
that amount.
• Therefore the net power injected by this bus is 24 MW and
consequently the injected power P5, inj in this case is taken
as 0.24 per unit.
• The voltage is calculated as V5(1) = 1.0169 < − 0.8894° .
• Unfortunately however the magnitude of the voltage
obtained above is not equal to the magnitude given in Table
3. We must therefore force this voltage magnitude to be
equal to that specified. This is accomplished by:

22
04/12/1433

This is accomplished by:

(20)

• This will fix the voltage magnitude to be 1.02 per unit while
retaining the phase of − 0.8894 ° .
• The corrected voltage is used in the next iteration.

Convergence of the Algorithm

• As can be seen from Table 3 that a total number of
4 real and 3 reactive powers are known to us.
• We must then calculate each of these from (6) and
(7) using the values of the voltage magnitudes and
their angle obtained after each iteration.
• The power mismatches are then calculated from (9)
and (10).
• The process is assumed to have converged when
each of ΔP2 , ΔP3, ΔP4 , ΔP5 , ΔQ2 , ΔQ3 and ΔQ4 is
below a small pre-specified value. At this point the
process is terminated.

23
04/12/1433

Acceleration factor:
• Sometimes to accelerate computation in the P-Q buses the
voltages obtained from (12) is multiplied by a constant.
• The voltage update of bus- i is then given by:

(21)

• λ is a constant that is known as the acceleration factor .

• The value of λ has to be below 2.0 for the convergence to occur.
• Table 4 lists the values of the bus voltages after the 1st iteration
and number of iterations required for the algorithm to converge
for different values of λ.
• It can be seen that the algorithm converges in the least number
of iterations when λ is 1.4 and the maximum number of
iterations are required when λ is 2. In fact the algorithm will
start to diverge if larger values of acceleration factor are chosen.

Table 4.4 Gauss-Seidel method: bus voltages after 1st

iteration and number of iterations required for convergence
for different values of  .
 Bus voltages (per unit) after 1st iteration No of
V2 V3 V4 V5 iterations
for
convergence
1 0.9927 2.6 0.9883 2.83 0.9968 3.48 1.02  0.89 28
2 0.9874 5.22 0.9766 8.04 0.9918 14.02 1.02 4.39 860
1.8 0.9883 4.7 0.9785 6.8 0.9903 11.12 1.02 3.52 54
1.6 0.9893 4.17 0.9807 5.67 0.9909 8.65 1.02 2.74 24
1.4 0.9903 3.64 0.9831 4.62 0.9926 6.57 1.02 2.05 14
1.2 0.9915 3.11 0.9857 3.68 0.9947 4.87 1.02 1.43 19

24
04/12/1433

End of Lecture Three

Thank you.

25