Maximizing Income of a Cascade Hydropower with Optimization Modeling

• Published in: Journal of renewable energy and environment Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 12 - 17
• Main Author: Hasan Huseyin Coban
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Materials and Energy Research Center (MERC) 01.02.2020
• Subjects: cascaded reservoir operating rule; hydroelectric producer; nonlinear optimization; optimization based electricity market; short-term hydro scheduling
• ISSN: 2423-5547; 2423-7469
• DOI: 10.30501/jree.2020.105267

This paper focuses on the short-term cascade hydro scheduling problem, especially in a competitive environment, namely in market conditions. A nonlinear stochastic optimization method is proposed to take into consideration the hydroelectric energy production as a function of hourly electricity market prices and water release rates. In order to solve a case study based on one of the Turkish cascaded hydropower facilities, the proposed method has been successfully applied to a wide variety of problems at a negligible computation time while providing a higher profit. The paper shows the benefits that could be achieved by applying a model based on the Quasi-Newton Method, which finds zeroes or local maxima and minima of solving a certain type of optimization functions because it can better handle the uncertainty, constraints, and complexity of the problem. Ten-year hourly water inflow data and electricity market prices were used as inputs, and the results of the cascade and single optimization were compared. A comparison study with the operation of each hydropower plant (HPP) separately showed that 18 % higher income was obtained with a cascade variant.