Hydrothermal Dispatch with Pumped Storage

A method is presented for optimizing the weekly or daily dispatch of a power system consisting of 16 hydro plants, 4 thermal plants, and a pumped storage plant. The main features of the method are: treatment of hydro plants in cascade on a river and its tributaries with freedom for heads to vary at each plant; allowances for hydro units out of service; optimum thermal unit scheduling, including the effect of start-up costs; maintenance of a minimum spinning reserve requirement in each interval in the scheduling period; inclusion of speed-no-load losses and head variation effects in scheduling pumped storage units. The optimization techniques and salient features of a computer program using these techniques are presented, together with numerical schedules from a pilot study based on a system model.