Model predictive economic/environmental dispatch of power systems with intermittent resources

This paper presents potential benefits of applying model predictive control (MPC) to solving the multi-objective economic/environmental dispatch problem in electric power systems with many intermittent resources. Based on the predictive model of the available output in the next short time period (e.g. 5 minutes) from the intermittent resources, this paper introduces a look-ahead optimal control algorithm for dispatching the available generation resources with the objective of minimizing objective function comprising both generation and environmental costs. This method is compared with (1) the static economic dispatch which treats intermittent resources as uncertain negative loads, and (2) the MPC dispatch with single objective function of minimizing the total generation cost. We show that the proposed MPC approach could lower the generation costs by directly dispatching the generator output from the renewable resources in order to compensate temporal load variations over pre-defined time horizon. Furthermore, the multi-objective economic/environmental cost function provides a formulation to study the tradeoff of efficiency and environmental impact in future energy systems. Simulation is implemented in a 12-bus power system comprising five generators to illustrate potential benefits from this look-ahead dispatch of both intermittent and more conventional power plants. The proposed method is directly applicable to managing power systems with large presence of wind and photovoltaic resources.