Power house I/O curves considering head dependency

Deregulation and liberalization of electric power industry, among other things, has created new requirements for the market participants. The power system engineer, operator, and, in general, the market participant is being faced with requirements for which he does not have adequate training and the proper software tools. Particularly for the generation companies (GenCo) the exploitation of hydro power plants is foremost concern. In this scenario the powerhouse input-output characteristics (I/O) of hydro power plants are major curves for the optimization problem of central exploitation. Some methods had been applied for the I/O curves determination without the head loss effect consideration and neglecting the non-linearity characteristic or considering as stepwise approximation. This paper presents a new method that takes into account both the non-linearity characteristic and the head loss effect. This method, due to unit´s non-linearity proper characteristics, requires that the cost of each unit (water flow through powerhouse) must be expressed in terms of quadratic costs. Through this approach, the obtained results are optimal, but referring to a convex objective function (approximated to the original function), with added advantage on reduced computation time.