Solving Unit Commitment Problem in the presence of Renewable Energy Resources using HSA

In this paper the problem of Unit Commitment (UC) is modified to consider the effect of Renewable EnergyResources (RERs). The main goal of electric power utilities is to provide high-quality and reliable power to theconsumers with lower costs regarding network operating constraints. High penetration of RERs into powersystems adds further complexity to the UC that require powerful methods to be solved. Wind and solar power areintermittent and the ability to predict production is limited. Given that UC is an optimization problem, HarmonySearch Algorithm (HSA) is found to be an appropriate alternative in this regard. HSA is simple to be implementedand also, it’s found that HSA leads to feasible solutions with higher convergence speed compared to theconventional optimization algorithms. To validate the practicability of the proposed approach, the simulation iscarried out on a test case with and without RERs. The obtained numerical results are compared with conventionalmethods on base case test. The results shows that the UC at the presence of RERs is more economical whencompared to traditional UC with only thermal units.

Keywords:

Unit Commitment , Renewable Energy Resource (RER) , Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) , Optimization