Parallel solution of large power system networks using the Multi-Area Thévenin Equivalents (MATE) algorithm

An implementation of the Multi-Area Thévenin Equivalents (MATE) partitioning framework for the parallel solution of large power system matrices is described in this paper. The solution of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system, of approximately 15,000 buses, obtained using both traditional sparse techniques and MATE were compared. As the main result of this project, the MATE algorithm achieved speedups of up to 7 times with respect to a well-known sparse linear system solver. Theoretical background in addition to the implementation approach, results, as well as limitations of the MATE algorithm are discussed.