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Introduction
Economic operation is very important for a power system to return a profit on the
capital invested. Two things put pressure on power companies to achieve maximum
possible efficiency.
(i) One dealing with minimum cost of power production called Economic dispatch.
(ii) Other dealing with minimum loss of the generated power delivery to the loads.
(ii)Minimizes the overall cost of fuel needed to serve the system load.
The economic dispatch problem can be solved by means of the optimal power flow
(OPF) program.
We first study the most economic distribution of power within the plant. The method
that we develop applies to economic scheduling of plant output for a given loading of
the system without considering of transmission losses.
Next we express transmission loss as a function of the outputs of the various plants.
Then we determine how the output of each of the plants of a system is scheduled to
achieve the minimum cost of power delivered to the load.
Because the total load of the power system varies throughout the day, coordinated
control of the power plant outputs is necessary to ensure generation to load balance
so that the system frequency will remain as close as possible to the nominal operating
value, usually 50 or 60 Hz. Also because of the daily load variation, the utility has to
decide on the basis of economics which generator to start up, which generators to
shut down, and in what order. The computational procedure for making such
decisions, called unit commitment.
Power plant consisting of several generating units which are constructed by investing
huge amount of money. Fuel cost, staff salary, interest and depreciation charges and
maintenance cost are some of the components of operating cost.
Fuel cost is the major portion of operating cost and it can be controlled. Therefore we
shall consider the fuel cost alone for further considerations. To get different output
power, we need to vary the fuel input.
Let Ci Rs/h be the input cost to generate a power of Pi MW in unit i. Fig.1 shows a
typical input output curve of a generating unit. For each generating unit there shall be
a minimum and maximum power generated as Pi,min and Pi,max.
Where, Ci = Input cost, Pi – Output power in MW, α, β and ϒ are cost coefficient.
A power plant may have several generating units. If the input-output characteristic of
different generator is identical, then the generating units can be equally loaded. But
generating units will generally have different input-output characteristic. This means
that for a particular input cost, the generator power Pi will be different for different
generating units in a plant.
As we shall see the criterion for distribution of the load between any two units is based
on whether increasing the generation of one unit, and decreasing the generation of
other unit by the same amount results in an increase or decrease in total cost. This
Thus while deciding the optimal scheduling, we are concerned with dCi/dPi,
Incremental cost (IC) which is determined by the slopes of the input-output curves.
Thus the incremental cost curve is the plot of dCi/dPi versus Pi. The dimension of
dCi/dPi is Rs/MWh.
The fig.2 shows that the incremental cost is quite linear with respect to power output
over an appreciable range. In analytical work, the curve is usually approximated by
one or two straight lines. The dashed line in the fig-2 is a good representation of the
curve.
Let total load in a plant is supplied by two units and that the division of load between
these units is such that the incremental cost of one unit is higher than that of the
other unit.
Now suppose some of the load is transferred from the unit with higher incremental
cost to the unit with lower incremental cost. Reducing the load on the unit with higher
incremental cost will result in greater reduction of cost than the increase in cost for
adding the same amount of load to the unit with lower incremental cost.
When this process is continued, a stage will reach where incremental costs of all the
units will be equal. Now the total cost of the generation will be minimum. Thus the
economical division of load between units within a plant is that all units must operate
at the same incremental cost.
Consider a system having two generating units having costs C 1 and C2.
Total output PT is equal to active power demand and is constant. It is desired to find P1
and P2 so that CT is minimum.
So it is concluded that the loads should be so allocated that the two units operate at
equal incremental costs.
The above concept can be extended to a system with any number of units.
Since plants are generally long distance a parts in an integrated system, it becomes
essential to consider transmission losses in deciding the load allocation to different
plants. This leads to the dispatch of power in an economic way so as to make the
overall cost to be the minimum.
PD -Total load in MW
The new cost function C is formed by combining the total fuel cost and the equality
constraint of equation(3) in the following manner.
The cost function C is often called the lagrangian, and we shall see that the parameter
λ which we now call Lagrange multiplier is the effective incremental fule cost of the
system when transmission line losses are taken into account.
For minimum cost we require the derivative of C with respect to each PGm to equal
zero,
Since PD is fixed and the fuel cost of any one unit varies only if the power output of
that unit is varied. Therefore equation (5) becomes
Because Cm depends on only PGn, the partial derivative of Cm can be replaced by the
full derivative and equation (6) then gives
So minimum fuel cost is obtained when the incremental fuel cost od each plant
multiplied by its penalty factor is the same for all the plants.
The transmission losses depend on line currents and line resistances. It is possible to
represent these losses as a function of plant loadings.
Fig. showa a simple system having two sources. Derive an expression for the
transmission loss and express it as a function of plant loadings. Assume the currents
I1 I2 are in phase.
Let ra, rb, rc be the resistances of line a,b and c respectively. The transmission loss is
Let P1 and P2 be the power outputs and V1 and V2 be the bus voltage and cos Φ1 and
cos Φ2 be the power factors of sources 1 and 2 respectively. Then
Where,
P-plant loading in pu
B-Loss coefficient
Example:1
When the total load is 100 MW, what is the optimum sharing of load?
Solution:
But P1 + P2 = 100 MW
Example:2
A power system consisting of two generators of capacity 210MW each supplies a total load of
310 MW at a certain time. The respective incremental fuel cost of Generator-1 and Generator-
2 are:
Where, powers PG in MW and costs C in Rs/hr. Determine (i) the most economical division of
load between the generators and (ii) the saving in Rs/day thereby obtained compared to equal
load sharing between the machines.
Solution:
Case-1: the most economical division of load between the generators
Unit Commitment
The total load in the power system varies throughout the day and reaches different
peak value from one day to another. Different combination of generators are to be
connected in the system to meet the varying load. When the load increases, the utility
has to decide in advance the sequence in which the generator units are to be brought
in. Similarly when the load decreases, the operating engineer need to know in advance
the sequence in which the generating units are to be shut down. The problem of
finding the order in which the units are to be shut down over a period of time (say one
day), so the total operating cost involved on that day is minimum, is known as Unit
Commitment(UC). Thus UC problem is economic dispatch over a day. The period
considered may be a week, a month or a year.
Constraints on UC problem
The objective of unit commitment is not economical to run all the units available all
the time. To determine the units of plants that should operate for a particular load is
the problem of unit commitment.
This problem is important for thermal power plant because the operating cost and
start up time are high and hence their on-off status is important.
A simple approach to the problem is to impose priority ordering, wherein the most
efficient unit is loaded first, and then followed by the less efficient units in order as the
load increases.
Finding the most economical combination of units that can supply this load demand is
to try all possible combination of units that can supply this load; to divide the load
optimally among the units of each combination by use of the co-ordination equation,
so as to find most economical operating cost of combination then to determine the
combination which has the least operating cost among all these. These combinations
can be solved by dynamic programming method.
In FDP, the initial conditions are easily specified, calculation can be carried out for
any desired length of time and the previous history of each unit can be calculated at
every stage.
The operating cost for any stage needs method of economic dispatch. This is due to
the fact that for any given combination of units, the operating cost is minimum if all
the units in this combination are operating at equal incremental cost.
Two other variables enter the strategy for UC by Forward dynamic programming. This
is because a no of possible combinations exist for every state. Let this be denoted by
K. Another variable is the no. of paths or strategies to save at every step. Let this
variable be denoted as L.
Procedure
• The stage in load cycle is specified as i. We start with i=1 i.e. first stage.
• The operating cost for this stage is computed. This has to be repeated for all
possible combination K.
• Check whether the program has reached the last stage in load cycle. If yes
optimal schedule is printed. Otherwise i is uploaded to (i+1) and program is
repeated.
Almost all generating companies have tie line interconnections to neighboring utilities.
Tie lines allow the sharing of generation resources in emergencies and economies of
power production under normal conditions of operation.
For purpose of control the entire interconnected system is subdivided into control
areas which usually confirm to the boundaries of one or more companies. The net
Frequency changes occur because system loads varies randomly throughout the day
so that an exact forecast of real power demand cannot be assured. The imbalance
between real power generation and load demand (plus losses) throughout the daily
load cycle causes kinetic energy of rotation to be either added to or taken from the
online generating units, and frequency throughout the interconnected system varies
as a result. Each control area has a central facility called Energy control centre, which
monitors the system frequency and the actual power flows on its tie lines to
neighboring areas. The deviation between desired and actual system frequency is then
combined with the deviation from the scheduled net interchange to form a composite
measure called the area control error (ACE).
To remove area control error, the energy control center sends command signals to the
generating units at the power plants within its area to control the generator outputs so
as to restore the net interchange power to scheduled values and assist in restoring the
system frequency to its desired value. The monitoring, telemetering, processing and
control functions are coordinated within the individual area by the computer based
automatic generation control(AGC) system at the energy control centre. The governors
on units of the interconnected system tend to maintain load-generation balance rather
than a specific speed and the supplementary control of the AGC system within the
individual control area functions so as to:
Allow the area to do its share to maintain the desired system frequency.
The ACE is continuously recorded within the energy control centre to show how well
the individual area is accomplishing these tasks.
Short Questions
1. What is Automatic load dispatching?’ 2017
Economic load dispatching is the distribution of the load among the generating units
in such a manner so as to minimize the cost of supplying the minute to-minute
requirements of the system.
In a large interconnected system it is humanly impossible to calculate and adjust such
generations and hence the help of digital computer system along with analogue