A spinning reserve, load shedding, and economic dispatch solution by Bender's decomposition

Spinning reserve in a thermal power system is a type of relevant economic issue in a deregulated environment. As system security is dependent on the dynamic response, the influence of system fast spinning reserve and amount of low-frequency load shedding are elements of economic cost. This paper deals with the composed problem of optimizing economic dispatch, fast spinning reserve and load shedding in order to withstand major sudden generation losses without collapsing by cascading effects. The proposed method uses Bender's decomposition in order to solve the problem by stages and is applicable to any power system. Application to Chilean Northern System is included to test the proposed method. Results show good convergence and easiness to obtain an optimum despite the wide range of feasible solutions for the problem. The composed cost of reserve and load shedding represents an important percentage of this system operating costs.