This paper presents novel methods to approximate the nonlinear AC optimal
power flow (OPF) into tractable linear/quadratic programming (LP/QP) based OPF
problems that can be used for power system planning and operation. We derive a
linear power flow approximation and consider a convex reformulation of the
power losses in the form of absolute value functions. We show four ways how to
incorporate this approximation into LP/QP based OPF problems. In a
comprehensive case study the usefulness of our OPF methods is analyzed and
compared with an existing OPF relaxation and approximation method. As a result,
the errors on voltage magnitudes and angles are reasonable, while obtaining
near-optimal results for typical scenarios. We find that our methods reduce
significantly the computational complexity compared to the nonlinear AC-OPF
making them a good choice for planning purposes
