Data-driven look-ahead unit commitment considering forbidden zones and dynamic ramping rates

Abstract

Look-ahead unit commitment (LAUC) is recently introduced among independent system operators (ISOs) in the U.S. to increase generation capacity by committing more generators after day-ahead unit commitment when facing various uncertainties in the power system operations. However, as the share of intermittent renewable energy increases significantly in the power generation portfolio, the load continues to fluctuate, and unexpected events and market behaviors happen nowadays, the ISOs are facing new critical challenges to maintain the reliability of power system. To systematically manage these uncertainties and corresponding challenges, new advanced approaches are urgently required to improve current LAUC models and solution methods. Therefore, in this paper, we first propose a new formulation to represent forbidden zones and dynamic ramping rate limits, which help capture the system operation status more accurately and hedge against the uncertainties more effectively, and then correspondingly propose a data-driven risk-averse LAUC model. Our computational experiments show how the size of data influences operational decisions and how the inclusion of forbidden zones and dynamic ramping provide better decisions.