A tradeoff between unit capacity and average production cost in spinning reserve optimization

Abstract In power systems the spinning reserve (SR) amount can be determined by deterministic or probabilistic techniques. Probabilistic techniques draw more attention since they can consider the economics and the stochastic nature of system behavior and component failures. In probabilistic techniques, the tradeoff between cost and reliability directly affects the SR deployment and it has been extensively analyzed. However, there is another tradeoff which reflects the compromise between the unit capacity and average production cost in the SR optimization problem. This tradeoff impacts the solution accuracy to a certain extent and influences the complexity of the model, and it has not been explicitly analyzed before. In this paper, a new SR optimization method is proposed in which the tradeoff between unit capacity and average production cost is well respected. The proposed method strikes a good balance between solution accuracy and computation efficiency and can obtain better results within a desirable run time compared with those of the previous methods. Besides, the proposed method can also be used to improve the solution of the reserve constrained unit commitment problem. It can lower the total cost by just redistributing the MW dispatch even when the SSR is fixed. The efficiency and validity of the proposed method are verified using the IEEE reliability test system.