Balancing authority area coordination with limited exchange of information

In this paper, we propose a coordination scheme between balancing authority (BA) areas in an interconnected power system that decreases the regulation amount needed as well as the associated costs. Our approach aims at mimicking the behavior of the automatic generation control (AGC) system in a scenario where the whole interconnected system is assumed to be operated by a single BA area. To this end, we modify the area control error (ACE), which is fed into the AGC system of each BA area, and determine the AGC allocation based on a distributed algorithm that identifies the least expensive generators, with the mismatch of the total regulation needed being the only information exchanged between BA areas. We demonstrate the proposed ideas with the 3-machine 9-bus Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system, and compare the performance of our method with other three existing coordination approaches.