Investigations on power system operation and management in restructured market

Abstract

Traditionally, in many countries, electrical power industry has been structured in a vertically integrated manner. The generation, transmission and distribution of electric power are totally controlled by large utilities within the region of their operation, where these utilities are the only providers of electricity. In such market scenarios, utilities have to operate within the policies, guidelines and regulations of the government while being assured of minimum profit without any risk. This assurance has led to incompetent and sluggish attitude in the industry with lack of motivation for technical innovation, efficient management and customer focus. To overcome these drawbacks of the monopolistic market, most of the utilities are getting restructured. This work addresses some of the technical challenges encountered in the restructured market such as optimal power ow (OPF), determination of total transfer capability (TTC), available transfer capability (ATC), transmission pricing and congestion management. New algorithms based on differential evolution have been suggested to solve these problems and the results are compared with other methods. Dispatching electricity and its management is an important control activity in a power system. With an increasing number of bilateral/multilateral con- tracts being signed for electricity market trades, the possibility of insufficient resources leading to network congestion may be inevitable. Under such circumstances, OPF solution techniques play an important role for the management of power ows in restructured market. In this work, a new algorithm for solving OPF using differential evolution (DE) is proposed. The algorithm is demonstrated on IEEE 14 and 30 bus systems. To meet the increase in load demand, 25% of additional load is assigned to all the buses in IEEE 30 bus system. Four simultaneous bilateral and two multilateral transactions are carried out on IEEE 30 bus system and the feasibility of the transactions is checked without violating the network constraints.