With more than 350 power plants, 8,600 miles of high voltage transmission lines, and more than seven million electricity customers, running the six-state regional grid is a continuous balancing act. Therefore, dispatching power resources to reliably serve electricity demand is one of the most critical tasks in electric power system operations. But doing this efficiently and economically is getting increasingly challenging as more demand resources and weather-dependent wind- and solar-power resources come on line. These resources introduce unprecedented levels of uncertainty in real-time operations around how much power is going to be demanded from consumers or available to supply it.
To help our control room operators anticipate such uncertainty and dispatch the grid in the most reliable manner possible, ISO New England computer scientists and their partners have developed a pioneering risk management tool that quantifies uncertainty, uses a modeling framework to analyze it, and then provides an efficient unit commitment solution. This powerful computer application increases power system reliability and minimizes dispatch costs for a sizable savings, and remains effective even as uncertainty levels increase.
This advanced research, developed by ISO New England’s Business Architecture and Technology team members Drs. Eugene Litvinov, Jinye Zhao, and Tongxin Zheng, in collaboration with Dr. Xu Andy Sun from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr. Dimitris Bertsimas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was originally highlighted in an IEEE Transactions on Power Systems journal paper entitled, “Adaptive Robust Optimization for the Security Constrained Unit Commitment Problem.”
The ISO is putting the new methodology into practice as part of our Do Not Exceed (DNE) Dispatch Project to enable the efficient and reliable dispatch of wind resources. The project is expected to ‘go live’ in mid-2016 for wind resources and mid-2017 for intermittent hydro resources. The project will, among other things, incorporate these resources into real-time dispatch and allow them to set the price for wholesale electricity, which will help provide proper market signals for new capacity.
This innovative approach to unit commitment highlights just one of the many areas of diverse research that ISO New England is conducting to ensure efficient market pricing and reliable and economic operations in the context of a rapidly evolving resource mix. The impact of the ISO’s research also extends far beyond New England borders: the journal paper has been referenced by researchers in hundreds of other academic and industry publications so far.
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Gordon van Welie is the President and CEO of ISO New England Inc. ISO New England is the independent, not-for-profit corporation responsible for the reliable operation of New England’s electric power generation and transmission system, overseeing and ensuring the fair administration of the region’s wholesale electricity markets, and managing comprehensive regional electric power planning. For more information about ISO New England, please visit www.iso-ne.com.
Gordon van Welie
President and CEO
ISO New England Inc.
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