In this paper, the solution of the optimal power flow dispatching (OPFD) problem by a primal-dual interior point method is considered. Several primal-dual methods for optimal power flow (OPF) have been suggested, all of which are essentially direct extensions of primal-dual methods for linear programming. The aim of the present work is to enhance convergence through two modifications: a filter technique to guide the choice of the step length and an altered search direction in order to avoid convergence to a nonminimizing stationary point. A reduction in computational time is also gained through solving a positive definite matrix for the search direction. Numerical tests on standard IEEE systems and on a realistic network are very encouraging and show that the new algorithm converges where other algorithms fail.