Feasible reserve in day-ahead unit commitment using scenario-based optimization

Abstract

This paper investigates the feasible reserve of diesel generators in day-ahead unit commitment (DAUC) in order to handle the uncertainties of renewable energy sources. Unlike other studies that deal with the ramping of generators, this paper extends the ramp rate consideration further, using dynamic limits for the scheduling of available reserves (feasible reserve) to deal with hidden infeasible reserve issues found in the literature. The unit commitment (UC) problem is solved as a two-stage day-ahead robust scenario-based unit commitment using a metaheuristic new variant of particle swarm optimization (PSO) called partitioned step PSO (PSPSO) that can deal with the dynamic system. The PSPSO was pre-optimized and was able to find the solution for the base-case UC problem in a short time. The evaluation of the optimized UC schedules for different degrees of reserve consideration was analyzed. The results reveal that there is a significant advantage in using the feasible reserve formulation, especially for the deterministic approach, over the conventional computation in dealing with uncertainties in on-the-day operations even with the increase in the reserve schedule.