Divide to conquer: decomposition methods for energy optimization

Abstract

Modern electricity systems provide a plethora of challenging issues in optimization. The increasing penetration of low carbon renewable sources of energy introduces uncertainty in problems traditionally modeled in a deterministic setting. The liberalization of the electricity sector brought the need of designing sound markets, ensuring capacity investments while properly reflecting strategic interactions. In all these problems, hedging risk, possibly in a dynamic manner, is also a concern. The fact of representing uncertainty and/or competition of different companies in a multi-settlement power market considerably increases the number of variables and constraints. For this reason, usually a trade-off needs to be found between modeling and numerical tractability: the more details are brought into the model, the harder becomes the optimization problem. For structured optimization and generalized equilibrium problems, we explore some variants of solution methods based on Lagrangian relaxation and on Benders decomposition. Throughout we keep as a leading thread the actual practical value of such techniques in terms of their efficiency to solve energy related problems.