Short-Term Dispatch with Built-In Coordination of Energy and Power Balance: Formulation and Practicability Validation

The conventional power dispatch is formulated considering the time-interval-based energy balance, where the continuous-time power balance is considered by preparing sufficient reserve. This paper presents a new short-term dispatch model with built-in coordination of energy balance and power balance, aiming at reducing the overall operation costs while not influencing the security. The generation adjustment behavior within the dispatch interval is formulated in mixed integer linear programming (MILP) form, which enables the explicit expression of power balance requirement and costs. Different from existing dispatch model that sets the energy balance task to the load forecast at the dispatch interval, the proposed dispatch model allows the flexible adjustment of the energy balance. To exhibit the dependency of the proposed method on the high-resolution load forecast accuracy, a quantitative analysis to show the effective space of the proposed method is presented. We present a method to calculate the region of forecast errors by under which the proposed method remains cost-saving. Multiple case studies based on utility data show that the proposed method can provide a cost saving from 1.25% to 8.06%. Also, the proposed method can stay effective even when the forecast error exceeds 47%, which validates the practical potential of the proposed method.