A Load-Based Method for Peak Operations of Cascaded Hydropower Stations

Abstract Short-term generation scheduling of cascade hydropower stations has always been one of the core tasks of power system operations. However, with the rapid increase of the number of power stations and the complexity of operation constraints, it is facing more and more challenges to quickly obtain practical day-ahead generation schedules. Based on the practical project of Hongshui River, a load-based method for peak operations of cascaded hydropower stations is proposed. The method takes the maximum effective generation production of cascaded hydropower stations as the objective, and introduces the generation weight coefficient by referring to load profile change. The purpose is to make the hydropower station generate power according to the priority of load peak, average and valley so that the generation schedules effectively meet the peak-shaving demand of the power grid. Moreover, a heuristic search procedure is developed to guide reasonable load distribution of hydropower stations. The method has been applied to a cascaded hydropower stations on the main stream of Hongshui River. The computational efficiency and rationality of the results have been verified in a case study, which shows that it is a feasible and practical method to solve the short-term operation problem of cascaded hydropower stations.