Dynamic Line Ratings in AC Optimal Power Flow: Transient Temperature, Decomposition, and Large-scale Evaluation

As power grids experience increasing renewable penetration and rapid load growth from AI data centers and electrification, alleviating line congestion becomes critical to unlocking additional grid capacity. This work investigates Dynamic Line Rating (DLR), a congestion mitigation method that adjusts power line current limits in response to meteorological conditions. Unlike traditional approaches that impose predefined time-varying limits, we propose a novel optimization framework that embeds the transient-state heat equation governing conductor temperature dynamics, enabling direct constraints on conductor temperature rather than simplified steady-state approximations. We derive a closed-form solution to the heat equation, enabling a finite-dimensional reformulation of the dynamics. We then leverage a distributed decomposition method, a bi-level Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with provable convergence, aided by regularity properties of the heat equation solution. These modeling and algorithmic innovations allow us to conduct the first large-scale evaluation of DLR using multi-period AC optimal power flow. Numerical experiments on the 2000-bus Texas grid demonstrate that DLR allows significant reduction in generation cost in congested systems over Static Line Rating (SLR) and Ambient Adjusted Ratings (AAR). The transient temperature formulation provides additional grid flexibility and headroom benefits with minimal computational overhead.