Economic/environmental dispatch of an interconnected power system considering Multiple Fuel Sources

Due to the ever stringent environmental regulations, the power producers have been forced to produce electric power at the least price and minimum level of emissions. The generation electrical power from fossil fuel releases several impurities into atmosphere and this become excrescent if the generating unit is fueled with Multiple Fuel Sources (MFS). Inclusion of this issue in the operational task is a welcome perspective. Nevertheless numerous published reports deal only the cost effective operation, this work proposes a more accurate and practical operational model considering valve-point effects, CO2 emission and MFS. This power system operational problem is constructed as a multi-objective non-linear optimization problem which considers conflicting objectives. To address this problem, the modern nature inspired algorithm called Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) has been chosen as the primal optimizer. The fuzzy decision making mechanism is adopted to determine the best compromised solution in multi-objective framework. Further, the ALO is applied to solve the operational problem taking into consideration the MFS and tie line capacity between different areas of the power system. To validate the effectiveness of ALO, it is implemented on the standard test system comprises of 10 generating units and various kinds of power system operations are performed. Moreover, the comparison and performance analysis confirm that the current proposal is found enhanced in terms of solution quality.