Probabilistic assessment of hydrothermal unit commitment

This paper presents a new method for determining the hydrothermal unit commitment in the presence of reliability constraints that arise from the forced outages of the thermal units and the uncertainty of the load demand. The segmentation method is employed for determining the loss of load probability index and evaluating the expected cost of generation. The thermal unit commitment is optimized using the dynamic programming approach. A new technique is introduced to construct the expected incremental cost grid for thermal generation so that the gradient method can be applied for handling the hydrothermal coordination.