Power flow calculation plays a significant role in power system studies and operation. To ensure the reliable prediction of system states during planning studies and in the operating environment, a reliable power flow algorithm is desired. However, the traditional power flow methods (such as the Gauss Seidel method and the Newton-Raphson method) are not guaranteed to obtain a converged solution when the system is heavily loaded.

This thesis describes a novel non-iterative holomorphic embedding (HE) method to solve the power flow problem that eliminates the convergence issues and the uncertainty of the existence of the solution. It is guaranteed to find a converged solution if the solution exists, and will signal by an oscillation of the result if there is no solution exists. Furthermore, it does not require a guess of the initial voltage solution.

By embedding the complex-valued parameter α into the voltage function, the power balance equations become holomorphic functions. Then the embedded voltage functions are expanded as a Maclaurin power series, V(α). The diagonal Padé approximant calculated from V(α) gives the maximal analytic continuation of V(α), and produces a reliable solution of voltages. The connection between mathematical theory and its application to power flow calculation is described in detail.

With the existing bus-type-switching routine, the models of phase shifters and three-winding transformers are proposed to enable the HE algorithm to solve practical large-scale systems. Additionally, sparsity techniques are used to store the sparse bus admittance matrix. The modified HE algorithm is programmed in MATLAB. A study parameter β is introduced in the embedding formula βα + (1- β)α^2. By varying the value of β, numerical tests of different embedding formulae are conducted on the three-bus, IEEE 14-bus, 118-bus, 300-bus, and the ERCOT systems, and the numerical performance as a function of β is analyzed to determine the “best” embedding formula. The obtained power-flow solutions are validated using MATPOWER.