Minimum Capacity of Wind and Solar Energy Considering the Expansion of Hydro Power Plants

Abstract

The pressure of low-carbon development drives the further integration of wind turbine (WT), photovoltaic units (PV) and hydro plants. The WT, PV and hydro plants in a certain area should be considered together as they have stong correlation. This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic programming model for the capacity planning of WT and PV in a hydro power system. The first stage is the capacity investment on the WT and PV while the second stage is the operation of power system considering hydro constraints. The scenarios in the stochastic programming are extracted from historical data. The model is in the mixed-integer bilinear formulation and solved by an iterative trial-and-error method. A power system in Southwest China is adapted as the test system. Different cases include the expansion of normal hydro plant (NHP), pumped storage hydro plant (PSHP) and NHP plus PSHP are considered. The results demonstrate that the NHP is more effective in reducing the capacity of WT and PV and the curtailment decreases with the integration of hydro plants.