Real-time scheduling of hydro cascaded system using evolutionary computation

In Slovenia, there are three hydro cascaded systems (HCS) accounting for some 35% of the total Slovenian power generation and playing an important role in optimizing the overall power system performance. While hydrothermal scheduling for the entire Slovenian EPS is performed centrally for 24 hours ahead, it is up to local control centers to determine optimal scheduling for each individual hydropower plant (HPP). In this paper, a computational tool for the optimal scheduling of HCS that has been developed as an integral part of the Soske Elektrarne (SENG) local center energy management system (EMS) is presented. The developed software package has been tested against a number of operational scenarios and an important improvement in SoCa river HCS performance has been observed.