On the Scheduling of Hydro Power Plant Systems in the Frame of the Unit Commitment Problem

Abstract

The hydro-thermal coordination problem consists in finding a balance between production and consumption for every moment. The aim is to control hydro power in a way such that thermal fuel costs are minimized In this report we preassume the thermal unit commitment to be already established (cf. [2]). The remaining problem is to find an optimal schedule of the load among the generating hydro and thermal units, which is known as the Economic Dispatch problem. Here we concentrate on the hydro part of the system. We introduce the mathematical model of hydraulically coupled systems of storage power plants. As against other authors (cf. [1], [5]) the model contains the full nonlinear dependence of generation from head. For the mathematical solution technique we apply a decomposition — convexification procedure proposed by Gfrerer [3].