LECTURE ON UNIT COMMITMENT

AU SPONSORED FDTP

Dr R Meenakumari
Professor
Department of EEE
Kongu Engineering college
Paavai College of Engineering

What is Unit commitment?

Scheduling of a set of generating units to be on,

off, or in standby/banking mode for a given period
of time to meet a certain objective.

For a power system operated by a vertically

integrated monopoly, committing units is performed
centrally by the utility, and the objective is to
minimize costs subject to supplying all demand
(and reserve margins)

Paavai College of Engineering

What is Unit commitment?

In a competitive environment, each GENCO must

decide which units to commit, such that profit is
maximized, based on the number of contracted MW

The additional MWhr it forecasts that it can profitably

wrest from its competitors in the spot market; and
the prices at which it will be compensated.

Paavai College of Engineering

What is Unit commitment?

A UC schedule is developed for N units and T

periods. A typical UC schedule might look like

Paavai College of Engineering

What is Unit commitment?

Since uncertainty in the inputs becomes large beyond

one week into the future, the UC schedule is typically
developed for the following week.

It is common to consider schedules that allow unitstatus change from hour to hour, so that a weekly
schedule is made up of 168 periods.

UC decision involves committing the generating units

during each hour of the planning period, by considering
system capacity requirements, reserve, and the
constraints on the start-up and shut-down of units.
Paavai College of Engineering

Factors to consider in solving UC

problem

Objective of the unit commitment

Quantity to be supplied
Compensating the electricity supplier
Source of electrical energy

Regulated environment Cost minimization (or)

De-regulated environment Profit maximization

Paavai College of Engineering

Constraints in the UC problem

Spinning reserve
Thermal unit constraints

Minimum up time
Minimum down time
Crew constraints
Start up cost

Other constraints
Hydro constraints
Must run
Fuel constraints

Paavai College of Engineering

Solution methods for the UC problem

Finding an optimal solution is very difficult
solving the UC problem requires that many
economic dispatch calculations need to be
performed
One possible way - do an exhaustive search
for a small system this can be done, but for a
reasonably sized system this would take too
long

Paavai College of Engineering

Solution methods for the UC problem

Optimisation techniques
Priority list method
Integer Programming
Mixed Integer programming
Branch and bound method
Lagrangian relaxation method
Paavai College of Engineering

Solution methods for the UC problem

Stochastic
algorithms

Evolutionary

search

Artificial Neural networks

Simulated annealing
Genetic algorithms
Evolutionary programming
Ant Colony optimisaton
Particle swarm optimisation
Paavai College of Engineering

10

How Do We Solve the Problem?

If a unit is on, designate this with 1 and

respectively, the off unit is 0
decide for the next hour. For eg., we will have
0 1 1 0 1" if we have five units
Based on that, solve the economic dispatch
problem for unit 2, 3 and 5
start turning on U2, U3, U5
When the next hour comes, committ them up and
run

Paavai College of Engineering

11

How Do We Solve the Problem?

How do we come up with this unit commitment

"0 1 1 0 1" ?
One very simplistic way: if we have very few
units, go over all combinations from hour to hour
For each combination at a given hour, solve the
economic dispatch
For each hour, pick the combination giving the
lowest cost

Paavai College of Engineering

12