  This paper investigates the role of feasible initial guesses and large
consensus-violation penalization in distributed optimization for Optimal Power
Flow (OPF) problems. Specifically, we discuss the behavior of the Alternating
Direction of Multipliers Method (ADMM). We show that in case of large
consensus-violation penalization ADMM might exhibit slow progress. We support
this observation by an analysis of the algorithmic properties of ADMM.
Furthermore, we illustrate our findings considering the IEEE 57 bus system and
we draw upon a comparison of ADMM and the Augmented Lagrangian Alternating
Direction Inexact Newton (ALADIN) method.
