Tandem Hydro Scheduling in Indian Electricity Market

Papiya Dattaray Abhijit Abhyankar

EES, IIT Delhi EE Dept., IIT Delhi
New Delhi, India New Delhi, India
papiyadattaray@gmail.com abhyankar@ee.iitd.ac.in

Abstract— The paper gives a complete account of the various vik Volume of water spilled by ith
scheduling and moderation issues faced by the system operators reservoir in kth hour
(SO) at the Load despatch centres (LDCs) in India while
furnishing generation despatch schedules for a system of Run-
Ci,1....Ci,6 Power generation coefficients at
of-River (ROR) type of plants arranged in tandem. It looks into
the clauses in the Indian Electricity Grid Code (IEGC)
ith hydro plant
pertaining to hydrogenation along with providing a detailed
account of the scheduling procedure followed today and tries to Tki Water transport delay from
deliver compact solutions by developing optimization models for reservoir k to reservoir j
the same. Cumulative as well as individual plant generation
schedules for 24 hours in a day are obtained for a system of v Minimum bound on reservoir
cascaded run-of-river (ROR) type hydro plants while catering to spill
varied objective functions in the Indian electricity market.

Index Terms-- Scheduling, moderation, ROR, Hydro generation T Total time horizon
Scheduling.
E Total expected energy at
Notation availability bid for the day

The notations used in the paper - x ,x Minimum and maximum

bounds on storage

I,i Set and index of reservoirs q Minimum and maximum

,q
bounds on discharge
K,k Set and index of hours in the time horizon
x Initial storage volume of ith
Λk Forecasted energy price for reservoir
hour no. K
x Final storage volume of ith
P Power generation of plant i in hour k reservoir

Pd Power demand at each hour , Maximum and minimum limits

of generation
x Water storage of reservoir at end the end
of kth hour
I. INTRODUCTION
a Inflow to reservoir i in hour kth hour A. Process of Scheduling
System operators (SO) at the regional load dispatch centers
q Turbine discharge by ith plant in kth hour (RLDCs) in India come up with daily generation and drawal
schedules for its generating stations as well as beneficiaries,
Non-effective discharge for Riparian which the respective entities are bound to honor except under
water rights certain contingent situations. The Central generating stations
based upon a foreseen capability to deliver certain megawatts
for the next day, advises the same to the RLDC by 9 a.m. The

978-1-4799-1303-9/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

RLDC breaks up and tabulates these output capability
declarations (DCs) as per the beneficiaries' plant-wise shares
and conveys their entitlements to State Load Dispatch
Centers (SLDCs) by 10 am for the next day. Entitlements in
other central stations are similarly advised by the RLDC to
the various SLDCs.
SLDCs on a parallel front, receive availability status
bids from their intra state generating stations with which they
carry out a detailed exercise to find out how best can the
expected consumer demand in their respective states be met
over the day, while considering their own generating stations,
along with entitlements in the Central stations. While doing
so they also take into account outstanding irrigation release
requirements and load curtailments as committed to the
respective areas. The SLDCs convey their final schedule of
power drawal from the Central stations to the RLDC (limited
to their entitlements for the day).
The RLDC aggregates these requisitions and
determines the dispatch schedules for the Central generating
stations and the drawal schedules for the beneficiaries duly
incorporating any bilateral agreements and making necessary
adjustments for transmission losses. It then issues this by 5
pm which becomes effective from the following midnight.
These schedules become both the operational as well as the
commercial datum except for cases of contingencies where
the Central stations are allowed to prospectively revise their
output capability declarations and beneficiaries to revise their
requisitions; the schedules can then be revised by the RLDC
correspondingly.
B. Moderation
While coming up with despatch schedules for the generating
stations, RLDC summates all the declared capacities (DC’s)
of each of the stations in its region for a given time block to
get an aggregated column (having 24 elements) of total
capacity declared at every hour. It then compares this with the
cumulative load curve of the region and redistributes the
aggregated DCs such that it follows the load profile the best.
This process is termed as Moderation, after which the
schedules are despatched to the individual stations for every
hour in the same ratio in which they had originally declared
their capacities.
This method hardly makes use of the hydro resources
optimally; neither does it consider any other hydro related
constraints. In cases where we have a system of hydro plants
in tandem, scheduling needs to consider a number of binding
constraints which limit the maximum generation at any
particular hour. Besides, the method is crude based on
heuristics and manual adjustments. We hereby propose
compact optimization models in order to come up with
schedules that satisfy a given objective considering different
physical, technical and commercial constraints.
C. ROR plants in tandem
Run of River (ROR) power stations with pondage and storage
are designed to operate during peak hours to meet system
peak demand as they have the inherent ability for
instantaneous starting, stopping and load variations, which
help in enhancing the power system reliability. This system
of energy is truly green over and above large hydro as it
mostly does not require construction of large dams and
reservoirs, thereby not calling for flooding of low lying areas
which would have further required rehabilitation of the
dwelling population. They represent a unique energy solution
in the sense that though it may never act to serve the base
load owing to the small storage sizing, it may still provide a
consistent means of extracting energy from the natural flow
of any river stream if variability in the inflows is duly
accounted for. The system on most occasions consists of a set
of plants in tandem where generation of each of the
downstream plant is dependent upon the discharge of the
upstream plant which presents the operators with unique
problems of moderation and scheduling.
D. Hydrogeneration scheduling
According to the IEGC, section 6, clause no. 13
“The schedule finalized by the concerned load despatch
centre for hydro generating station, shall normally be such
that the scheduled energy for a day equals the total energy
(ex-bus) expected to be available on that day, as declared by
the generating station, based on foreseen/planned water
availability/release ”.
Again, according to IEGC, section 6, clause no. 10,
“The declaration of the generating capability by hydro ISGS
should include limitation on generation during specific time
periods, if any, on account of restriction(s) on water use due
to irrigation, drinking water, industrial, environmental
considerations etc. The concerned Load Dispatch Centre shall
periodically check that the generating station is declaring the
capacity and energy sincerely, and is not manipulating the
declaration with the intent of making undue money through
UI”
The Indian electricity code thus asks the LDCs to abide by
the total capacities declared by the hydro plants for the day on
one hand; and also to keep a check that they are doing so
honestly on the other. The SO can thus in no way afford to
blindly follow the capacity declarations that the Hydro
generating companies (H-Gencos) provide them with while
producing schedules; rather they need to devise scientific
tools to moderate upon the same taking into account all
feasible technical constraints. Moderation techniques based
on heuristics that are in practice today in the country can
never suffice for a complicated system of cascaded ROR
plants. We hereby propose optimization tools so that effective
moderation can successfully produce technically sound and
practicable schedules that satisfy all pertaining constraints.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II provides the
mathematical formulation of the problem. Section III
provides details of the simulated system and discusses results.
Finally, Section IV provides concluding remarks.
 II. PROBLEM FORMULATION
The short term hydro scheduling problem seeks to find out
the water discharges, storages and spillages for each reservoir
at each time interval over a day that meets a given
performance criterion subject to all possible constraints.
A. Objective function
The SO can look for satisfying different objectives while
coming up with schedules depending upon his requirement.
1) To mimic the load profile
Pertaining to the practice that is followed today, we set an
objective where the generation is made to track the load
profile by trying to minimize the squared sum of the error at
each hour between the normalized load and generation for a
total time interval of 24 hours.
( − ) Upper and lower limits are defined for each of the variables
(1)
2) Meeting the system peak
W×P (2)
The SO seeks to meet the cumulative peak load of the system
so the priority gets associated only with the peak hours while
maximizing the generation through the day. Here the SO
primarily looks at exploiting the inherent capability of hydro
plants to follow rapid load fluctuations.
3) Maximizing generation for the day
For a ROR plant, curbing generation at any hour leads to
spillage which is a waste of valuable natural resources,
because of which they are regarded as ‘Must Run Stations’.
Under such circumstances we propose that the SO should
schedule the ROR plants so that the resources are utilized to
the maximum and each plant is given to generate the
maximum it can, subjected to various constraints
P The system consists of a set of four reservoir-type cascaded
(3)
In each of the cases,
= C1×(x )2+C2×(q )2+C3×(x ×q ) + C4×(x )
+C5×(q )+C6 (4)
B. Hydro constraints
1) Water balance or equation of continuity:
At any hour the net storage at any reservoir is the summation
of the storage at the previous hour along with the inflow,
spillage and discharge from the upstream plant, minus its own
spillage and discharge in the given hour. A non-effective
discharge also needs to be accounted for against the riparian
water rights.
x =x + a + q T , + v T , - − q − v − q0 (5)
2) Maximum energy schedule capped by the
expected energy bid:
In case of hydro plants imbalance charges are levied based
upon the net energy deviation from its declared energy bid
over the entire period of 24 hours. The expected energy bid E
is primarily based on the inflow forecasts which is then
submitted to the LDC for scheduling.
P = (6)
3) Spillage is given a lower bound:
It is necessary only when the net reservoir discharge at a
given hour exceeds its upper limit and spilling is imperative
for meeting storage requirements
v <v (7)
4) Inequality constraints:
of discharge, storage and power generation which represent
the physical and technical constraints associated with any
plant.
q < q <q
x < x <x (8)
< <
5) Coupling constraints:
x =x
(9)
xT = x
Terminal reservoir volumes are previously set by the midterm
scheduling process. This constraint implies that the total
quantity of available water should be used at the end of the
total scheduling horizon.
III. CASE STUDY
The model has been developed and implemented in GAMS
and solved using the optimization solver MINOS (NLP
solver). MINOS is capable of solving models of types namely
LP, NLP, DNLP, RMINLP. The default algorithm of MINOS
is reduced-gradient combined with quasi-Newton. We solve a
linearly constrained non-linear optimization problem here.
A. Input data
hydro plants. The scheduling period considered is of 24
hours. Hydrogeneration data used for the present work is
given in Table I-III [2]. Table I gives the matrix of
hydrogenation coefficients [11]. Bounds on reservoir storage
volume, water discharge rates and boundary conditions are
given in Table II. Table III enlists hourly price forecasts
(assumed) while Table IV gives the hourly inflow forecasts
for the day (assumed). Table V gives the Total expected
energy availability bids for a day as submitted by the
generation stations to the LDCs day ahead (assumed). Units
of storage, spillage and inflows are 103m3 while units of
water discharge rates are 103m3/h. The transportation delays
considered are T1=1 h; T2=2 h; T3=3 h [11]
 TABLE I: HYDRO GENERATION COEFFICIENTS

Plants C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6

Generation (MW)
N1 -.001 -.1 .01 .40 4.0 -30
N2 -.001 -.1 .01 .38 3.5 -30
N3 -.001 -.1 .01 .30 3.0 -30
N4 -.001 -.1 .01 .38 3.8 -30

TABLE II: CHARACTERISTICS OF HYDRO STATIONS

Plants Xmin Xmax Umin Umax Xbeg Xend Vmax Time (Hours)
N1 80 250 5 15 100 120 20 Figure 3: Cumulative generation of all plants in tandem
N2 60 220 6 15 80 70 30
2) SO looks at meeting the peak demand :Generation
N3 100 240 10 30 170 70 40
meets the peak demand and prioritizes generation schedules
N4 70 260 13 25 150 120 50 at the respective hours of high demand for example in the
given case 9th to 15th hours as shown in Fig.4 and Fig.5.
TABLE III: TOTAL EXPECTED ENERGY AVAILABILITY BIDS

Expected Energy

Generation (MW)
Plant
Availability Bids
N1 1400
N2 1000
N3 700
N4 1200

B. Results and discussions

1) SO looks at following the load profile:The generation Time (Hours)
schedules try following the load variations across the day
Figure 4: Generation Schedule of individual plants
subjected to all constraints in keeping with the expected
availability bids. The load profile, individual generation
Generation (MW)

schedules and cumulative generation schedule of the tandem

plants are as given in Fig.1, Fig.2 and Fig.3 respectively.
Load (pu)

Time (Hours)
Figure 5: Cumulative gen to meet peak from 9th -15th hour

3) SO looks at maximizing total generation : SO’s

Time (Hours) objective of maximizing total generation in a day subjected to
Figure 1: Cumulative system load in pu various constraints.
Generation (MW)

Generation (MW)

Time (Hours) Time (Hours)

Figure 2: Individual plant generation schedule Figure 6: Generation Schedule of individual plants
Benefit of centrally optimizing and scheduling generation of
all the plants that are arranged in tandem stems from the fact
that none of the stations could on itself reach their maximum
capacity owing to the spatial temporal coupling between
them. In particular where discharges of the upstream plants
get limited by the storages of downstream plants, serious
problems arise as to how to effectively schedule plants. In a
deregulated scenario where each of the cascaded plants may
be owned by a different market player, each of whom is only
looking at its own profit; such an objective function based
optimized schedule procedure satisfies one and all. The
model not only renders a scientific and systematic side to the
daily scheduling process but also caters to the commercial
motifs of investors.
Generation (MW)
Time (Hours)
Figure 7: Cumulative generation schedule for all tandem plants
IV. CONCLUSION
The paper gives a detailed account of the procedures being
followed at the Load dispatch centers for scheduling and
moderation. It also explains why the task assumes special
significance when considering a system of cascaded ROR
plants and tries to provide significant solutions for the same.
With the compact optimization solvers, the authors have tried
to provide technically sound, scientific tools to the system
operators for their day to day activities of producing
generation schedules which are not only practically feasible
but also complying to all the relevant hydraulic constraints.
The three cases that have been simulated, provides the
operator with the option to choose any model that suits the
system conditions the best.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the
system engineers at the Northern Regional Load Dispatch
center, India and also the optimization solver package
developers in GAMS.
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