ABSTRACT
With the insignificant incremental cost involved in hydrogeneration, the problem of minimizing the operation cost of a hydro-thermal system essentially reduces to that of minimizing the fuel cost for thermal plants under the constraints of the water available for hydro generation in a given period of time. The problem thus belongs to the realm of dynamic optimization.In the past, many papers pertaining to optimal hydro-thermal scheduling assume water inflows to reservoirs and load demand to be deterministic. In practice, however, this is not true. To be realistic, the scheduling problem must be tackled through stochastic optimization. This paper presents a new effective approach to the optimal stochastic hydro-thermal scheduling problem. A computational algorithm based on first- order gradient technique is developed to solve the scheduling problem.
