Multi-area unit commitment

Unit commitment is an efficient method to lower the total cost of the power plant by scheduling units' generation and meeting the constraint condition. However, in practice, few power plants implement the algorithm for fear that the load response in the power plant would not be fast enough to track the unscheduled load demand from the power grid if some units of the power plant are shut down. This paper proposes a new unit commitment method that tries to solve this problem effectively. The proposed method guarantees the desired speed limit by setting the plant-level load tracking speed. In this method a ‘one-at-a-time’ unit commitment is accomplished. The most expensive unit (which is determined by computing its cost) is optimized, the unit commitment schedule is updated, and the load dispatch result is re-computed. The result will be repeatedly optimized until the spinning reserve or load tracking speed is lack. The optimization loop will breaks out as well if the unit schedules of two consecutive iterations over the time period remain unchanged. The test results from 10-machine system shows that the proposed method is easy to understand and quick to solve, and is of practical use.

Deterministic methods to evaluate unit commitment and spinning reserve requirements cannot explicitly recognise the stochastic nature of a power system. Probabilistic techniques can, however, be used to incorporate a wide range of stochastic system parameters. The usual techniques of probabilistic unit commitment in an interconnected power system consider the tie-line constraints but not the transmission facilities within the systems. In a real power system, the transmission facilities within the systems have limits and do fail. Units committed from only probabilistic generation studies, therefore, provide optimistic values. In the paper, the usual techniques of unit commitment are extended to calculate a risk value from a composite system point of view. The effect on the risk value of rapid start and hot reserve units are considered.

Coordinated scheduling of generators and tie lines in multi-area power systems under wind energy uncertainty

A short-term fuel-constrained thermal unit commitment method which includes significant constraints such as take-or-pay gas contracts and limitations associated with the gas delivery system is described. The fuel constraints are explicitly considered in determining the short-term (e.g., daily, weekly) thermal unit commitment strategy. The method results from the extension of a novel iterative approach consisting of two phases: a sequential commitment phase and a parameter adjustment phase. The method is effective in both its computational requirements and its solution quality. Illustrative examples are presented. >

An improved multi-area unit commitment and economic dispatch algorithm is proposed. The approach supplements the traditional dynamic programming unit commitment with heuristic adjustments to refine the commitment schedule in each area. A global economic dispatch scheme coordinates the transactions between areas. A new tie-line constraint checking is included which is simple and effective. The overall algorithm can be implemented on an IBM-PC, which can process a fairly large system in a reasonable period of time. Experimental results show the application potential of this method to general multi-area power generation scheduling problems.

In this paper, first time ever artificial colony bee search is applied for thermal unit commitment. The main aim of doing thermal unit commitment scheduling is to optimize running while ensuring security and reliability. In recent era, lot of attention is given to the environmental conditions. All developed and few developing countries are worrying about emission of carbon dioxide from thermal generating stations. In first section of this paper unit commitment and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is discussed. In next section methodology for adopting ABC and general constraints of unit commitment are discussed in great detail. In last section application of ABC for unit commitment is implementation of proposed algorithm is shown and obtained results are presented. It is observed that ABC produces good results for unit commitment problem and easy to implement.

Unit commitment is a complex problem which, until now and for real size systems, has been solved using heuristic methods only. This paper proposes a new Lagragian relaxation method, which produces ??-optimal solutions. The flexibility of the algorithm is such that numerous developments can be envisaged, such as simultaneous management of pumping units, probabilistic determination of the spinning reserve, etc.

Enhanced priority list unit commitment method for power systems with a high share of renewables

Concerning the realistic situation of power system in China, a novel unit commitment method is presented which takes comprehensive consideration for the coordinative operation of wind energy, demand response and thermal power. The proposed day-ahead scheduling scheme is aimed at practical utilization in current grid foundation. Particularly, this paper takes a practical consideration for the actual electricity consumption of electrical vehicles in China on the side of clients. A price mechanism based on power consumption contract of electrical vehicles (EVs) is proposed so that customers could regulate their charging behaviors towards an EV-friendly type. Moreover, a ten-level set of demand response is used and the uncertainty of wind power generation is regulated by a polyhedron set. The optimization model is built on an IEEE 114-bus system with 5 units, which is then solved by a real-code genetic algorithm. As shown in the numerical study, the proposed model can provide specific and economic beneficial dispatching schemes for system operators as well regulate power consumption of EVs, which effectiveness has been verified.

The stability control of nominal frequency and terminal voltage in an interconnected power system (IPS) is always a challenging task for researchers. The load variation or any disturbance affects the active and reactive power demands, which badly influence the normal working of IPS. In order to maintain frequency and terminal voltage at rated values, controllers are installed at generating stations to keep these parameters within the prescribed limits by varying the active and reactive power demands. This is accomplished by load frequency control (LFC) and automatic voltage regulator (AVR) loops, which are coupled to each other. Due to the complexity of the combined AVR-LFC model, the simultaneous control of frequency and terminal voltage in an IPS requires an intelligent control strategy. The performance of IPS solely depends upon the working of the controllers. This work presents the exploration of control methodology based on a proportional integral–proportional derivative (PI-PD) controller with combined LFC-AVR in a multi-area IPS. The PI-PD controller was tuned with recently developed nature-inspired computation algorithms including the Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA), learner performance-based behavior optimization (LPBO), and modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO). In the earlier part of this work, the proposed methodology was applied to a two-area IPS, and the output responses of LPBO-PI-PD, AOA-PI-PD, and MPSO-PI-PD control schemes were compared with an existing nonlinear threshold-accepting algorithm-based PID (NLTA-PID) controller. After achieving satisfactory results in the two-area IPS, the proposed scheme was examined in a three-area IPS with combined AVR and LFC. Finally, the reliability and efficacy of the proposed methodology was investigated on a three-area IPS with LFC-AVR with variations in the system parameters over a range of  ± 50%. The simulation results and a comprehensive comparison between the controllers clearly demonstrates that the proposed control schemes including LPBO-PI-PD, AOA-PI-PD, and MPSO-PI-PD are very reliable, and they can effectively stabilize the frequency and terminal voltage in a multi-area IPS with combined LFC and AVR.

Researches on the unit commitment with transmission network have been reported recently. However, most of these researches mainly discussed the security constrained unit commitment, while the relationship between unit commitment and transmission losses was not considered. However, from the standpoint of operating reserve for ensuring power supply reliability, a unit commitment considering transmission losses is required. Further, under the deregulation and liberalization of the electric power industry, not only the line's security but also transmission losses are expected to play an important role in calculating the network access charge, and unit commitment taking into account transmission losses is also desired from this viewpoint. In this paper, a unit commitment approach with both transmission losses and line flow constraint is presented. Based on a heuristic iterative optimization method, first, an initial schedule is created by using a successively decommitting unit approach that is proposed in this paper. Then, we determine constraints included in the unit commitment schedule by a heuristic iterative optimization approach, in which an algorithm able to get rid of line overload by DC optimal power flow is developed. Through numerical simulations on two test power systems, the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 142(4): 9–19, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.10116

A probabilistic technique is presented which can be used to develop unit commitment schedules for continually changing loads in an interconnected power system configuration for a specified period. The technique is developed on the basis of each area in a multi-area configuration fulfilling one of two different risk criteria. This approach, which is known as the two-risks concept, was illustrated in a recent publication (R. Billinton and N.A. Chowdhury, see ibid., vol.3, p.1479-87, 1988). The unit commitment during a specified scheduling period is constrained by risk criteria and economic factors. Typical unit commitment cases are illustrated with numerical examples.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

This paper presents the solving unit commitment (UC) problem using Modified Subgradient Method (MSG) method combined with Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm. UC problem is one of the important power system engineering hard-solving problems. The Lagrangian relaxation (LR) based methods are commonly used to solve the UC problem. The main disadvantage of this group of methods is the difference between the dual and the primal solution which gives some significant problems on the quality of the feasible solution. In this paper, MSG method which does not require any convexity and differentiability assumptions is used for solving the UC problem. MSG method depending on the initial value reaches zero duality gap. SA algorithm is used in order to assign the appropriate initial value for MSG method. The major advantage of the proposed approach is that it guarantees the zero duality gap independently from the size of the problem. In order to show the advantages of this proposed approach, the four-unit Tuncbilek thermal plant and ten-unit thermal plant which is usually used in literature are chosen as test systems. Penalty function (PF) method is also used to compare with our proposed method in terms of total cost and UC schedule.

Optimizing biogas plants with excess power unit and storage capacity in electricity and control reserve markets

In industry or any area increasing load is a vast problem for power generation plants due to increase in demand for power. So making balance between generation and demand is the operating principle of load frequency control (LFC). The reliable operation of a large interconnected power system necessarily requires an Automatic Generation Control (AGC). The objective of AGC is to regulate the power output of Generators within a specified area in response to change in the system frequency, tie line power or relation of the two to each other, so as to maintain the scheduled system frequency and power interchange in the other are within the prescribed limits. This paper presents the use of conventional PI controller and artificial intelligence to study the load frequency control of interconnected power system. In the proposed scheme, a control methodology is developed using conventional PI controller and Fuzzy Logic controller (FLC) for interconnected hydro-thermal power system. The control strategies guarantees that the steady state error of frequencies and inadvertent interchange of tie-lines power are maintained in a given tolerance limitations. The performances of the controllers are simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK package. A comparison of Fuzzy controller and PI controller based approaches shows the superiority of proposed Fuzzy logic controller for step change in loading conditions. The simulation results also tabulated as a comparative performance in view of settling time and peak over shoot.