Optimal Hydropower Maintenance Scheduling in Liberalized Markets

Abstract

Maintenance scheduling is an important and complex task in hydropower systems. In a liberalized market, the generation company will schedule maintenance periods to maximize the expected profit. This paper describes a method for hydropower maintenance scheduling suitable for a profit maximizing, price-taking and risk neutral hydropower producer selling energy and reserve capacity to separate markets. The method uses Benders decomposition principle to coordinate the timing of power plant maintenance with the medium-term scheduling of the hydropower system, treating inflow to reservoirs and prices for energy and reserve capacity as stochastic variables.The proposed method is applied in a case study for a Norwegian watercourse, and results, in terms of maintenance schedules and computational performance, are presented and discussed.

Accelerating Benders decomposition for short-term hydropower maintenance scheduling

“…Our Benders approach is not standard due to practical limitations in an industrial setting, regarding the access to computing facilities, commercial software and problem data. Moreover, in contrast with other applications of decomposition methods to GMS (Froger et al, 2016;Helseth et al, 2018), we focus on Benders acceleration in response to the computational challenge of accounting for the nonlinear effect of the number of active generators on the hydropower production (see Fig. 1), under uncertain inflows (Fig.…”

Lagrangian Relaxation Based on Improved Proximal Bundle Method for Short-Term Hydrothermal Scheduling

“…Equations (5)-(7) set the power ramping constraints of each unit, including the start-up ramp rate limit, shut-down ramp rate limit, and normal ramp-up and ramp-down limits. Equations (8) and (9) denote the logical status of unit commitment. Equations (10) and (11) set the minimum online and offline time periods of each unit, respectively.…”

“…GA falls into premature convergence easily. For large-scale systems, common approaches are based on decomposition techniques, such as the Lagrangian relaxation (LR) [8], Benders decomposition (BD) [9], and aggregation-disaggregation [10]. BD decomposes the primal problem into a master problem and some subproblems for dimension reduction.…”

A Regularized Benders Decomposition With Multiple Master Problems to Solve the Hydrothermal Generation Expansion Problem

“…Therefore, hydrothermal-based GEP largely relies on the co-optimization of investment decisions and long-term multistage stochastic dispatch policies. Also, there are several other applications with a similar structure, such as the maintenance optimization problem [21], where the algorithms and idea exploited in this work is also valid.…”