The Application of Deterministic and Probabilistic Methodologies to Spinning Reserve Policy in Thermal Generation Scheduling

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to determine the optimal spinning reserve policy in thermal generation scheduling. In this approach, the utility’s production costs and the customer’s outage cost are included into the study framework by applying both deterministic and probabilistic methods. The deterministic method is used first as a base to find the optimum generation schedule providing the generation and spinning reserve contribution from each generating unit. Then, from these results, the probabilistic method is applied to calculate the utility’s costs together with the customer’s outage cost. Changing reliability of the generation scheduling is done through the deterministic method by varying the fixed percentage spinning reserve. Then, the effect on all the cost components can be evaluated. Using the proposed method, the optimum spinning reserve policy can be found with the best compromise between the utility’s costs and the customer unserved energy cost. It can be applied in generation scheduling while the familiarly used deterministic method is still implemented without losing stochastic property considerations on both the generating unit outages and forecast demand uncertainty.