An MILP Model for Short-Term Peak Shaving Operation of Cascaded Hydropower Plants Considering Unit Commitment

To relieve the growing peaking regulation pressure on power gird and satisfy complex demand for scheduling of grid-connected units, this paper formulates a short-term peak shaving model for cascaded hydropower plants, in which operation status of units are taken into account. In this model, hydropower units are taken as the basic dispatching unit and minimizing the maximum residual load of power grid is adopted as the objective. With the linearization of the nonlinear objective, constraints related with water head, restricted operating zone constraint and unit performance curves, the developed model conforms to a standard MILP formulation. The compact MILP model is applied to the short-term operation of four cascaded hydropower plants located in Wujiang River. The results demonstrate that the proposed model has an excellent performance in peak shaving and high efficiency in computation.