ECONOMIC DISPATCH PROBLEM UNDER DEREGULATED ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Power utilities around the world are slowly undergoing a significant transformation from regulated to a deregulated power systems. The driving forces of deregulation are aiming to establish a competitive market in order to achieve lower rates for the consumers and higher efficiency for the suppliers. Power suppliers, both the conventional utilities as well as the Independent Power Producers (IPP), are actively competing with one another for customers. In this thesis, an efficient and reliable solution to economic dispatch problem under deregulated environment has been developed for units with smooth and non-smooth fuel cost characteristics. The proposed model using both genetic algorithm and evolutionary programming is capable of determining the global or near global optimal dispatch solutions in the cases where the classical algorithms cease to be applicable. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested and analyzed for the synthetic IEEE 30 bus test system incorporating simultaneous bilateral transactions and multilateral transactions, and the results obtained are found to be quite encouraging and satisfactory.