Optimal reserve management for restructured power generating systems

This paper presents a technique to determine the optimal reserve structure (reserve providers and the corresponding reserve capacity) for a restructured power generating system (GS). The reserve of a GS can be provided by its own generating units and can also be purchased from other GSs through the reserve agreements. The objective of reserve management for a GS is to minimize its total reserve cost while satisfying the reliability requirement. The reserve management is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large amount of calculations. In order to simplify the evaluation, a complex generating system (CGS) consisting of different GSs and the corresponding transmitting network is represented by its multi-state reliability equivalents. The universal generating functions (UGFs) of these equivalents are developed and the special operators for these UGFs are defined to evaluate the reliability of a particular GS, which has reserve agreements with other GSs in the CGS. The genetic algorithm (GA) has been used to solve the optimization problem. An improved power system-IEEE reliability test system is used to illustrate the technique.