Economic Dispatch Considering Hourly Capacity Allocation with a Variable Renewable and Hydro-Based Generation Portfolio

The objective of this paper is to assess an economic dispatch considering a power system portfolio, which includes predominant amount of hydro power and increasing quantities of intermittent renewables in relation to the total electric capacity. With growing importance of intermittent wind and solar generation taking part into power systems worldwide, there is need for greater chronological resolution to estimate the flexibility of the power system to offer firm capacity. In this way, a linear optimization model operating hourly is developed to calculate the minimum power system cost, while stablishing the capacity allocation to meet the projected load throughout one-year simulation, as an estimation of how the hourly economic dispatch impacts the scheduling of generators belonging to a power system with this portfolio composition. A central focus is how to operate the available hydro capacity to back up intermittent renewables, evaluating the physical hydro operating constraints, monthly energy balance and maximum power availability. A case study was simulated based on the Brazil’s power system configuration, showing that existing hydro capacity provide hourly flexibility to back-up intermittent renewables, potentially saving 1.2 Billion R$, about 3.6% of total system cost referred to 2019. It is worthwhile to realize that the developed methodology can be employed to other power systems with similar capacity portfolio structure for the purpose of calculating its optimum allocation for a specified region and target year.

Important Issues and Results When Considering the Stochastic Representation of Wind Power Plants in a Generation Optimization Model: An Application to the Large Brazilian Interconnected Power System

Wind power has an increasing share of the Brazilian energy market and may represent 11.6% of total capacity by 2024. For large hydro-thermal systems having high-storage capacity, a complementarity between hydro and wind production could have important effects. The current optimization models are applied to dispatch power plants to meet the market demand and optimize the generation dispatches considering only hydroelectric and thermal power plants. The remaining sources, including wind power, small-hydroelectric plants and biomass plants, are excluded from the optimization model and are included deterministically. This work introduces a general methodology to represent the stochastic behavior of wind production aimed at the planning and operation of large interconnected power systems. In fact, considering the generation of the wind power source stochastically could show the complementarity between the hydro and wind power production, reducing the energy price in the spot market with the reduction of thermal power dispatches. In addition to that, with a reduction in wind power and a simultaneous dry-season occurrence, this model, is able to show the need of thermal power plants dispatches as well as the reduction of the risk of energy shortages.

Reducing Intermittence of Renewable Energy Sources with Seasonal-Pumped-Storage Plants

This paper presents a computational method to model and evaluate if Pumped Storage Plants (PSP) have the potential to reduce the intermittency of wind generation from different sites in Brazil and to improve the operation efficiency of hydroelectric plants when operating in cascade. Since the problem to be solved does not have a defined analytic solution, a Stochastic Optimization Algorithm was implemented to reach an optimal solution to the set of equations, inputs and proposed scenarios. A case study was developed based on the Paraná River Basin and the results shows that the model can operate in a variety of different operational patterns, making feasible the evaluation of different hydrological and wind scenarios. Given the Model support, it is easy to assume different PSP storage and generation capacities, allowing the comparison between the efficiency improvement of a conventional Pumped-Storage and a Season-al-Pumped-Storage in the same scenario. The study concludes that a PSP can effectively reduce the intermittency of wind and solar sources and contribute to the optimization of the Brazilian electricity sector.

Optimal Portfolio Selection of Wind Power Plants Using a Stochastic Risk-Averse Optimization Model, Considering the Wind Complementarity of the Sites and a Budget Constraint

This work focuses on the best financial resources allocation to define a wind power plant portfolio, considering a set of feasible sites. To accomplish the problem formulation and solution, the first step was to establish a long-term wind series reconstruction methodology for generating scenarios of wind energy, applying it to study five different locations of the Brazilian territory. Secondly, a risk-averse stochastic optimization model was implemented and used to define the optimal wind power plant selection that maximizes the portfolio financial results, considering an investment budget constraint. In a sequence, a case study was developed to illustrate a practical situation of applying the methodology to the portfolio selection problem, considering five wind power plants options. The case study was supported by the proposed optimization model, using the scenarios of generation created by the reconstruction methodology. The obtained results show the model performance in terms of defining the best financial resources allocation considering the effect of the complementarity between sites, making it feasible to select the optimal set of wind power plants, characterizing a wind plant optimal portfolio that takes into account the budget constraint. The adopted methodology makes it possible to realize that the diversification of the portfolio depends on the investor risk aversion. Although applied to the Brazilian case, this model can be customized to solve a similar problem worldwide.