Short-term optimal scheduling of cascade hydropower plants shaving peak load for multiple power grids

Cascade hydropower plants which have good regulation performance and are managed by the dis-patching center of regional power grids are usually required to simultaneously shave the peak load for multiple provincial power grids, which is an important way of relieving the growing peak shaving pressure on power grids in central and eastern China. This paper establishes an optimization model for the short-term generation scheduling of cascade hydropower plants in regional power grids. In this model, minimizing the peak-valley load difference of multiple power grids is adopted as the objective function. In addition to conventional hydraulic constraints, the operation constraints of individual hy-dropower units, electrical constraints and head effect on the power generation are all considered to obtain precise scheduling. The original nonlinear and non-convex model is converted into a standard mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation through several linearization strategies. The re-sults for the real-world case study indicate that: 1) the proposed model is computationally efficient with a calculation time of 326 s; 2) the peak-valley differences of the Shanghai Power Grid and Zhejiang Power Grid decreased by 9.71% and 2.29%, respectively; 3) compared with actual operation, the proposed model shows better performance in peak shaving for multiple provincial power grids. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.