Day-ahead and Intraday Dispatch of an Integrated Biomass-Concentrated Solar System: A Multi-Objective Risk-Controlling Approach

Solar energy and bioenergy are two leading renewable forms of energy in the move toward a near-zero-emission electric power industry. Concentrated solar power units coupled with thermal storage and biomass power plant offer dispatchable electricity, raising their ever-growing role in future renewable-dominated networks. This paper proposes a day-ahead and intraday dispatch model for maximizing the profit of an Integrated Biomass-Concentrated Solar (IBCS) system considering the synergies arising from their coupled operation. To sensibly capture uncertainty and decision sequence of real-life electricity markets, a two-stage stochastic structure is proposed, while the solar-related uncertainty is involved using Information Gap Decision Theory (IGDT). The model is complemented with a novel multi-objective architecture based on the compound of IGDT and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), which allows handling risk exposure to both stochastic and IGDT inputs. The Pareto strategies in the multi-objective model are extracted through an expanded form of the -constraint method, whereas a posteriori approach based upon the out-of-sample assessment is applied to derive the optimal dispatch pattern among the generated Pareto strategies. The simulation results demonstrate that: 1) the proposed integrated dispatch model achieves substantial profitability, and 2) the performance of the suggested CVaR-IGDT model is superior to conventional approaches.