Unit commitment of thermal units in integration with wind and solar energy considering ancillary service management using priority list(IC) based genetic algorithm

Abstract

Demand for electricity is gradually increasing in India and use of more thermal power generation is leading to increased emissions. The effect of emission of thermal power plant is adverse to the environment; we cannot largely depend on thermal power plant for power generation. So, this work considered the integration of thermal units with the renewable sources like solar and wind, while accounting for ancillary service management and renewable energy uncertainties. Unit Commitment (UC) and Economic load dispatch (ELD) have significant research applications in power systems and optimize the total production cost for the forecasted load demand of particular hour. UC decides the turn ON/ turn OFF decision of particular unit/units according to the forecasted load of particular hour optimally while satisfying all constraints of the unit like minimum up and down time, startup and shut down cost constraints. ELD optimizes the operation cost for all scheduled generating units with respect to the forecasted load demands of customers in particular hour. UC and ELD are performed to reduce the total production cost to as minimum as possible, so that customer will get electricity at minimum cost. This paper presents a Genetic algorithm and priority list approach for wind and solar integrated system having thermal generators, for solving UC problem. The dynamic programming approach is used for the UC and ELD and production cost of each hour is calculated for comparison purpose.