New approach for simulating an energy limited hydro unit

It is a requirement of optimal production cost scheduling to allocate all of the assigned energy to an energy limited (EL) hydro unit. The authors present a methodology for the probabilistic simulation of the EL unit incorporating the randomness in the water head. The methodology utilises the concept of the multistate model of a generating unit to represent an EL unit with the randomness in the availability of hydro energy. The distribution of the EL unit with random hydro energy is derived from the distributions of the random outages of the EL unit and the random availability of hydro energy (water head). The method is capable of handling any number of EL hydro units and there is no conceptual limitation applying it to a power system with other types of EL units