ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the most popular techniques for load flow computation. The load flow or power flow problem consists in finding the steady-state operating point of an electric power system. More specifically, given the load demanded at consumption buses and the power supplied by generators, the aim is to obtain all bus voltages and complex power flowing through all network components. One of the keys for the terrific success attained by load flow solvers during the 1970s was the introduction of efficient numerical techniques to solve large and sparse equation systems. Specifying the complex voltage of the slack bus and freeing its complex power imply simply that the respective pair of equations will be ignored during the load flow process. Among the several decoupled Newton-Raphson formulations proposed in the literature, by far the most successful is the so-called fast decoupled load flow, published in 1974.
