Economic Operation of Power System -ECONOMIC DISPATCH

Introduction

Economic operation is very important for a power system to return a profit on the
capital invested. Two things put pressure on power companies to achieve maximum
possible efficiency.

(a) Rates fixed by regulatory bodies and

(b) the importance of conservation of fuel place

Maximum efficiency minimizes the cost of electrical energy consumed by the

consumers. Also it reduces the rising prices for fuel, labor, supplies and maintenance.
Operational economics involving power generation and delivery of the power. Delivery
can be subdivided into two parts.

(i) One dealing with minimum cost of power production called Economic dispatch.

(ii) Other dealing with minimum loss of the generated power delivery to the loads.

For any specified load condition, economic dispatch

(i) determines the power output of each plant.

(ii)Minimizes the overall cost of fuel needed to serve the system load.

The economic dispatch problem can be solved by means of the optimal power flow
(OPF) program.

We first study the most economic distribution of power within the plant. The method
that we develop applies to economic scheduling of plant output for a given loading of
the system without considering of transmission losses.

Next we express transmission loss as a function of the outputs of the various plants.

Then we determine how the output of each of the plants of a system is scheduled to
achieve the minimum cost of power delivered to the load.

Because the total load of the power system varies throughout the day, coordinated
control of the power plant outputs is necessary to ensure generation to load balance
so that the system frequency will remain as close as possible to the nominal operating
value, usually 50 or 60 Hz. Also because of the daily load variation, the utility has to
decide on the basis of economics which generator to start up, which generators to
shut down, and in what order. The computational procedure for making such
decisions, called unit commitment.
Distribution of load between units within a plant

Power plant consisting of several generating units which are constructed by investing
huge amount of money. Fuel cost, staff salary, interest and depreciation charges and
maintenance cost are some of the components of operating cost.

Fuel cost is the major portion of operating cost and it can be controlled. Therefore we
shall consider the fuel cost alone for further considerations. To get different output
power, we need to vary the fuel input.

Fuel input can be measured in tones/hr or millions of BTU(British Thermal Unit)/hr.

Knowing the cost of the fuel, in terms of Rs/tone or Rs/Millions of BTU, input to the
generating unit can be expressed as Rs/hr.

Let Ci Rs/h be the input cost to generate a power of Pi MW in unit i. Fig.1 shows a
typical input output curve of a generating unit. For each generating unit there shall be
a minimum and maximum power generated as Pi,min and Pi,max.

If the input-output curve of Unit ‘I’ is quadratic , we can write

Where, Ci = Input cost, Pi – Output power in MW, α, β and ϒ are cost coefficient.

A power plant may have several generating units. If the input-output characteristic of
different generator is identical, then the generating units can be equally loaded. But
generating units will generally have different input-output characteristic. This means
that for a particular input cost, the generator power Pi will be different for different
generating units in a plant.

Incremental cost curve

As we shall see the criterion for distribution of the load between any two units is based
on whether increasing the generation of one unit, and decreasing the generation of
other unit by the same amount results in an increase or decrease in total cost. This
can be obtained if we can calculate the change in input cost ΔCi for a small change in
power ΔPi.

Thus while deciding the optimal scheduling, we are concerned with dCi/dPi,
Incremental cost (IC) which is determined by the slopes of the input-output curves.
Thus the incremental cost curve is the plot of dCi/dPi versus Pi. The dimension of
dCi/dPi is Rs/MWh.

Plot of Ic versus power o/p is shown in fig.2.

The fig.2 shows that the incremental cost is quite linear with respect to power output
over an appreciable range. In analytical work, the curve is usually approximated by
one or two straight lines. The dashed line in the fig-2 is a good representation of the
curve.

Economical division of plant load between generating units in a plant

Let total load in a plant is supplied by two units and that the division of load between
these units is such that the incremental cost of one unit is higher than that of the
other unit.

Now suppose some of the load is transferred from the unit with higher incremental
cost to the unit with lower incremental cost. Reducing the load on the unit with higher
incremental cost will result in greater reduction of cost than the increase in cost for
adding the same amount of load to the unit with lower incremental cost.
The transfer of load from one to other can be continued with a reduction of total cost
until the incremental costs of the two units are equal. The same reason can be
extended to a plant with more than two generating units also. In this case, if any two
units have different incremental costs, then in order to decrease the total cost of
generation, decrease the output power in units having higher incremental cost and
increase the output power in units having lower incremental cost.

When this process is continued, a stage will reach where incremental costs of all the
units will be equal. Now the total cost of the generation will be minimum. Thus the
economical division of load between units within a plant is that all units must operate
at the same incremental cost.

Economy loading neglecting transmission losses

Consider a system having two generating units having costs C 1 and C2.

C1 and C2 are the fuel costs of the two units in Rs/hr.

Total output PT is equal to active power demand and is constant. It is desired to find P1
and P2 so that CT is minimum.

From equation (5)

For minimum total cost CT,

Combining equation (6), (7) and (8) we have

So it is concluded that the loads should be so allocated that the two units operate at
equal incremental costs.

The above concept can be extended to a system with any number of units.
Thus optimum economy is achieved if every unit operates at the same cost.
Distribution of load between different plants

Since plants are generally long distance a parts in an integrated system, it becomes
essential to consider transmission losses in deciding the load allocation to different
plants. This leads to the dispatch of power in an economic way so as to make the
overall cost to be the minimum.

Let there be ‘m’ no of plants in a system integrated by transmission line.

PG1, PG2..PGm - Generation output of the plants in MW

PD -Total load in MW

PL - Losses in transmission lines.

Where, Cn – Fuel cost of nth plant in Rs/hr

PGn – output of nth plant in MW.

Our objective is to obtain a minimum cost for a fixed system load PD subject to the
power balance constraint of equation (3). We now present the procedure for solving
such minimization problems called the method of Lagrange multipliers.

The new cost function C is formed by combining the total fuel cost and the equality
constraint of equation(3) in the following manner.

The cost function C is often called the lagrangian, and we shall see that the parameter
λ which we now call Lagrange multiplier is the effective incremental fule cost of the
system when transmission line losses are taken into account.

C and λ are expressed in Rs/hr

For minimum cost we require the derivative of C with respect to each PGm to equal
zero,

Since PD is fixed and the fuel cost of any one unit varies only if the power output of
that unit is varied. Therefore equation (5) becomes

Because Cm depends on only PGn, the partial derivative of Cm can be replaced by the
full derivative and equation (6) then gives

where Ln is called the penalty factor for plant n and is given by

Equation (7) is called the exact coordinate equation.

From equation (7)

So minimum fuel cost is obtained when the incremental fuel cost od each plant
multiplied by its penalty factor is the same for all the plants.

Representation of transmission losses

The transmission losses depend on line currents and line resistances. It is possible to
represent these losses as a function of plant loadings.

Fig. showa a simple system having two sources. Derive an expression for the
transmission loss and express it as a function of plant loadings. Assume the currents
I1 I2 are in phase.

Let ra, rb, rc be the resistances of line a,b and c respectively. The transmission loss is

Since I1 and I2 are in same phase

Let P1 and P2 be the power outputs and V1 and V2 be the bus voltage and cos Φ1 and
cos Φ2 be the power factors of sources 1 and 2 respectively. Then

Substituting these values in transmission line equation we get

Where,
The transmission loss equation:

To include the effect of transmission losses in deciding the load allocation, it is

necessary to represent the loss as a function of plant loading. The general form of loss
equation is

Where, PL – transmission losses in pu

P-plant loading in pu

B-Loss coefficient

For a two generating source system

For a three generating source system

The matrix representation of above loss equation is

Where for a total of k sources

Where, PT is the transposition of P. The B coefficients depend on the system network

parameters, configuration, plant power factor and voltages etc.

Example:1

The incremental cost characteristic of the two units in a plant are

IC1 = 0.1 P1+8.0 Rs/MWh

Prepared by Balaram Das, EE Dept., GIET, Gunupur Page 12

IC2 = 0.15 P2 + 3.0 Rs/MWh

When the total load is 100 MW, what is the optimum sharing of load?

Solution:

But P1 + P2 = 100 MW

Optimum sharing of load is

Example:2

A power system consisting of two generators of capacity 210MW each supplies a total load of
310 MW at a certain time. The respective incremental fuel cost of Generator-1 and Generator-
2 are:

Where, powers PG in MW and costs C in Rs/hr. Determine (i) the most economical division of
load between the generators and (ii) the saving in Rs/day thereby obtained compared to equal
load sharing between the machines.
Solution:
Case-1: the most economical division of load between the generators
Case-2: the saving in Rs/day thereby obtained compared to equal load sharing between the
machines.
Th

The negative sign indicates a decrease in cost as output is decreasing.

Therefore the net increase in cost = 858.619-788.972=69.647 per hr.