Modeling Medium Term Hydroelectric System Operation with Large-scale Penetration of Intermittent Generation

Electricity production from renewable energy sources (RES) is being promoted worldwide as a way to decrease CO2 and pollutant emissions. Nowadays special regime generation in Spain corresponds to cogeneration, renewable and biomass (photovoltaic solar power, wind power, geothermal, small hydro plants, and biomass and waste power plants) and urban and mining waste. Some of these RES are highly intermittent with sharp changes in power production and difficult predictability. When the ratio of electricity generated by this intermittent generation (IG) to its installed power is small the system operation is not substantially modified, it may be easily considered as a variation in the demand. However, when the penetration of IG is high enough then they may cause problems in the operation and should be taken expressly into account in the operation models that need to be revisited for including it. This paper presents a new medium-term planning model for evaluating a large-scale penetration of IG. In particular, nowadays wind power generation is the most important IG. Other potential IGs are solar or tidal power generation and will be modeled in the same fashion.