Constraint Audited Receding Horizon Dispatch for Curtailment Recovery in Export Capped Utility Scale Photovoltaic Plants With Battery Energy Storage

Hard point-of-interconnection (POI) export limits can strand otherwise-available photovoltaic (PV) energy unless battery storage is dispatched with sufficient anticipation and under physically consistent constraints.This study evaluates a constraint-audited receding-horizon dispatch framework for curtailment recovery at an anonymized 230 MW utility-scale PV plant with a modeled 195.5 MW export cap and a nominal 30 MW/140 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS).The mixed-integer model predictive controller enforces BESS power and energy limits, charge-discharge exclusivity, no grid charging, forecast-dependent discharge headroom, first-action receding-horizon execution, and a common 50%-to-50% terminal-energy protocol.Twelve rolling monthly folds from September 2024 to August 2025 are evaluated against cap-only operation and a protocol-matched perfect-information Oracle.Cap-only operation curtails 26,279 MWh (4.9872% of evaluated PV energy).A transparent 72 h Diurnal model predictive control (MPC) reduces curtailment to 11,719.454MWh, recovers 14,559.546MWh, and closes 98.450% of the modeled cap-only-to-Oracle recoverable-energy opportunity; the matched Oracle curtails 11,490.175MWh.All 3 h closed-loop trajectories satisfy the modeled export cap, BESS limits, terminal equality, charge-discharge exclusivity, discharge-headroom rule, and no-grid-import condition.A matched information-sensitivity analysis then compares History-CatBoost and Weather-CatBoost under the same controller.Weather-CatBoost lowers daylight mean absolute error (MAE) by 2.225 MW at 24 h and 1.175 MW at 72 h relative to History-CatBoost, while annual curtailment is 288.601MWh higher at 24 h and 99.699 MWh lower at 72 h; the monthly block-bootstrap intervals include zero in both cases.Histogram gradient boosting (HGB) robustness and BESS-sensitivity results further show that the incremental control value of weather information is model-and configuration-dependent.Under the tested plant, cap, BESS, 3 h resolution, horizon, and terminal protocol, physically constrained anticipatory dispatch captures most of the modeled recoverable curtailed energy, leaving comparatively limited residual opportunity for additional forecast sophistication.