Power System State Estimation by Phase Synchronization and Eigenvectors

To estimate accurate voltage phasors from inaccurate voltage magnitude and complex power measurements, the standard approach is to iteratively refine a good initial guess using the Gauss--Newton method. But the nonconvexity of the estimation makes the Gauss--Newton method sensitive to its initial guess, so human intervention is needed to detect convergence to plausible but ultimately spurious estimates. This paper makes a novel connection between the angle estimation subproblem and phase synchronization to yield two key benefits: (1) an exceptionally high quality initial guess over the angles, known as a \emph{spectral initialization}; (2) a correctness guarantee for the estimated angles, known as a \emph{global optimality certificate}. These are formulated as sparse eigenvalue-eigenvector problems, which we efficiently compute in time comparable to a few Gauss-Newton iterations. Our experiments on the complete set of Polish, PEGASE, and RTE models show, where voltage magnitudes are already reasonably accurate, that spectral initialization provides an almost-perfect single-shot estimation of $n$ angles from $2n$ moderately noisy bus power measurements (i.e. $n$ pairs of PQ measurements), whose correctness becomes guaranteed after a single Gauss--Newton iteration. For less accurate voltage magnitudes, the performance of the method degrades gracefully; even with moderate voltage magnitude errors, the estimated voltage angles remain surprisingly accurate.