A step toward cleaner energy production: A water saving-based optimization approach for economic dispatch in modern power systems

This paper proposes a novel approach to discover an optimal solution of multi-area dynamic economic dispatch integrated with wind power and pumped hydroelectric storage. Minimizing of water consumption associated with power production in thermal power plants is yet to be addressed in economic dispatch problem. Thus, it is crucial to modernize the conventional power industry to save the water utilization in the process of generating electric energy. As a result, making a feasible power generation schedule by finding a trade-off between total generation cost and water consumption is the main focus of this paper. Toward this end, this study introduces an effective optimization approach for decreasing the contaminants rproduced by the combustion-based power plants via reflecting the impacts of wind power and storage systems in the proposed problem. An efficient optimization algorithm considering the merits of whale optimization algorithm and wavelet mutation is also proposed to handle the complications of the trade-off between generation cost and water consumption. The proposed approach is applied to 40-unit 4-area IEEE system by 1) scrutinizing the performance of the hybrid framework from different standpoints, 2) achieving an improvement about 5.4% in the operation cost, and 3) promoting the decarbonized economy by implementing rrenewable energy.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a novel approach to the multi-area dynamic economic dispatch problem and addresses the issue of water consumption in thermal power plants. By considering the impact of wind power and storage systems, the proposed optimization algorithm achieves a trade-off between generation cost and water consumption.