A long-term intelligent operation and management model of cascade hydropower stations based on chance constrained programming under multi-market coupling

Abstract

Under the medium- and long-term electric markets, cascaded hydropower stations face a series of practical challenges due to the uncertainty of inflow and market price. For long-term dispatch scheduling, the allocation of power generation in multimarkets is critical, including clean energy priority consumption market, inter provincial market and intra provincial market in order to maximize the operator’s expected revenue and reduce the market operation risks. Based on the hydro-dominant electricity market structure and settlement rules, we propose a long-term optimal operation method for cascade hydropower stations considering the uncertainty of multiple variables. First, a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model is used to handle the time-varying and seasonal characteristics of inflow series by using a copula connect function to fit the joint distribution of the monthly inflow, the clearing price of the intra provincial market and the delivery volume of the inter provincial market. Then, uncertain chance-constrained programming is established. Finally, a developed particle swarm optimization algorithm embedded in a Monte Carlo simulation is solved for hydropower operation policies, and the maximum revenue, resource allocation and scheduling strategy are obtained under the corresponding risk tolerance. Taking the actual data of cascaded hydropower stations in Yunnan Province, China, as an example, a simulation analysis is carried out. The results show that the proposed method can reasonably describe the uncertainty and correlation between the variables, realizing the optimal allocation of resources among multimarkets, and provide references for the long-term optimal operation of cascade hydropower stations in a multimarket environment. The results also show that the decision strategies should be determined considering the decision-maker’s risk preference.