The effect of wind power plants on the total cost of production in economic dispatch problems

Abstract

This Study presents a new approach for Economic Dispatch (ED) problems incorporating wind power plants using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. As the wind power plant is renewable and clean, widely distributed, produces no greenhouse gas emissions during operation and uses little land, its effect to conventional units that should be analyzed. Also the total cost is dependent on wind speed in specific period of time. Therefore, the mathematical techniques are not appropriate to find the global optimum ED. In this study, PSO is proposed to deal with wind power plants in ED. The system employed to apply the PSO in ED is three generators power system. Finally, to show the good performance of wind power plants to decreasing the total cost of production, two different scenarios with and without wind power plants are simulated and the results are compared to each other. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.