Battelle Memorial Institute

Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc.

Feng Pan

Yonghong Chen

Jesse T Holzer

Arun Veeramany

Zhongyu Wu

Edward Rothberg

Fast simultaneous feasibility testing (SFT) for management of an electrical power grid is achieved through various innovations. The computation problem relates to evaluation of candidate solutions for external power flows into a power grid, with respect to predetermined constraints and contingencies. A perturbation approach with precomputation is extended to encompass grid states (e.g. time periods) in addition to contingencies. Advantages derive from: fewer factorizations or inversions of large matrices; decoupling of state-dependent and contingency-dependent perturbations, leaving relatively few perturbations jointly dependent on both state and contingency; or making approximations by discarding small jointly dependent terms. Significant computation reductions allow a single workstation to perform SFT for 36 hours of a day-ahead cycle.

Fast simultaneous feasibility test with electrical power grid perturbations over states and contingencies

Apparatus and methods are disclosed for solving Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problems, such as Security Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) problems used by power grid authorities to perform day-ahead market clearing. In certain examples, a plurality of threads of a software tool implementing a concurrent optimizer can be executed concurrently and sequentially to generate new solutions to a SCUC problem for an upcoming planning horizon. Data can be shared among the concurrently executing threads, such as intermediate/incumbent solutions and hints regarding the fixing of variables and constraints to reduce the size of the SCUC problem. In some examples, the threads are seeded with historical solutions from prior planning horizons. The software tool can select a best solution from the solutions generated by the threads, and determine dispatch instructions for a device coupled to the power grid for the upcoming planning horizon based at least in part on the selected solution.

Integrated solution techniques for security constrained unit commitment problem

Fast simultaneous feasibility testing (SFT) for management of an electrical power grid is achieved through various innovations. The computation problem relates to evaluation of candidate solutions for external power flows into a power grid, with respect to predetermined constraints and contingencies. Storage and computations are reduced by formulating the problem in terms of transactional nodes (e.g. third party connections for generators and loads) instead of the larger number of bus nodes. Further advantages are achieved by precomputing matrices that can be reused across multiple SFT invocations, organizing matrices and operations to reduce storage and computation, and eliminating branches that have no contingency violations. The fast SFT further enables new applications for integrating SFT with a Security-Constrained Unit Commitment (SCUC) optimizer for efficient single pass solutions; operating SFT as a service to multiple SCUC solvers; or integration with Security-Constrained Economic Dispatch (SCED) optimization.

Growing community of inventors

Sugar Land, TX, United States of America

Feng Pan