Day-ahead power system scheduling considering water consumption in power plants

Power generation consumes a substantial amount of water in the power industry. In order to address the impact of water consumption restriction on the power generation, this paper proposes a security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) formulation considering water consumption impact as an additional constraint. To this end, the water consumption in power plants is formulated. Consequently, the SCUC is extended to consider the consumed water volume as a restricting factor. A procedure is introduced to investigate the most appropriate point of power generation operation to save a vital amount of water by raising reasonable generation costs. The objective of the proposed model is to minimize the generation cost, while water consumption is considered as an additional constraint of the problem. The proposed method is then applied on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 118-bus standard test system. It is shown that a dramatic amount of water volume can be saved in the industry by exploiting rationally higher costs in the power generation.