Short-Term Hydropower Scheduling Model with Two Coupled Temporal Scales

Abstract

This paper presents a short-term hydropower scheduling model to determine the number of operating units and the power in each quarter hour and for each hydroplant. A reservoir operation and hydropower unit commitment problem are formulated and solved using linear programming (LP) and dynamic programming (DP), respectively. Two temporal scales are coupled with each other in formulating the reservoir operation problem, with the quarter-hourly and hourly scales used for power and water balances, respectively. The model has its advantages in adapting to preferences of shift engineers by prioritizing the objective and constraints, as well as in taking into account the roles of reservoirs in balancing power demands. The model and procedure are applied to deal with the Yunnan provincial hydropower system that consists of 37 reservoirs, believed to be one of the largest-scale problems ever reported. The experience from this work suggests that the gap between academy and industry is mainly attributable to modeling, not the methods or algorithms used to solve the models.