Planning available capacity in electrical power generation

Abstract

In planning for the utilisation of available capacity, an electrical company needs to know the power requirements of the system. The load versus duration curve provides information on past demand patterns and thus forms a basis for planning future supply needs. Since electrical supply is discrete by nature, the load versus duration curve only approximates to the true supply requirements. This paper develops an algorithm for finding an optimal step function approximation to the load versus duration curve. It is based on the minimisation of a total penalty function.