Two stage approach for economic power dispatch

This paper presents a practical approach to implement the economic power dispatch of the power system in Southern China. The proposed economic dispatch method consists of two stages. The first stage involves the classic economic power dispatch without considering network loss, where the initial generation plans of the generator units are determined according to the rank of fuel consuming characteristic of the units or the principal of equal incremental rate. The second stage involves economic dispatch considering network loss and security constraints, where two objectives are proposed for the second stage. One is loss minimization, and another is the minimum movement of generator output from the initial generation plan. For showing the effectiveness of the proposed two stage economic dispatch approach, the IEEE 30-bus system is used for testing. The test results show the two stage dispatch method can not only reduce the system losses and system fuel consumption, but also control the movement of the generator output.