Generation scheduling in a competitive environment

Electric power restructuring offers a major change to the vertically integrated monopoly. The change manifests the main part of engineers’ efforts to reshape the three components of today’s vertically integrated monopoly: generation, distribution and transmission. In a restructured environment, the main tasks of these three components will remain the same as before, however, to comply with FERC orders, new types of unbundling, coordination and rules are to be established to guarantee competition and non-discriminatory open access to all users. This paper provides the generation schedule of a GENCO in a deregulated power system. It is shown that the goal of generation schedule in the new structure is different from the traditional centralized power systems. The modeling of generation scheduling problem in a competitive environment is demonstrated by taking into account the main purposes of GENCOs which are selling electricity as much as possible and making higher profit. The GENCOs of an area are introduced via a model whose objective function consists of hourly spot market price as income and different kinds of costs. The constraints are the general ones of such a problem e.g. minimum up/down time, minimum and maximum generation and ramp rate. Using one of the classical optimization methods, the hourly generation schedule of the generating units will be obtained in this competitive environment. The results of this section will be used by ISO. The ISO will finalize the schedules of GENCOs by taking into account the technical considerations like the power flow of transmission lines. The model and the optimization methods are implemented on IEEE-RTS benchmark with 24 buses and 32 generating units.