Optimal Load Dispatch with Unit Commitment

An efficient and economic power generation has always held an important position in the electric power industry. Operational Economics involving power generation and delivery can be subdivided as – Economic Load Dispatch and Unit Commitment. The main objective of Economic Load Dispatch is the process of allocating the required load demand between the available generation units such that the cost of generation is minimum. Furthermore, Unit Commitment is an optimization technique that determines the units that are feasible and should be committed over a period of time to serve the load demand at minimum operating cost, satisfying all plant and system constraints. The test system is also analyzed under 3-phase symmetrical fault with its effect on generation. There exist various UC scheduling algorithms among which my research work is based on Dynamic Programming method which is robust in nature, takes less computation time and includes plant constraints like start-up cost, fuel cost etc. The performance of Dynamic Programming method is further enhanced by adopting Sequential Combination – DP method which involves reduction in the dimensionality state of the solution space and faster computation speed. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is investigated on 26-Bus Multi Machine system consisting of six thermal generating units and is carried out using MATLAB.