ABSTRACT
The conversion of fossil fuel into electricity is an inefficient process. Even the most modern combined cycle plants are between 50 and 60% efficient, most of the energy wasted in the conversion process is heat (Karkim et al. 2001). The principle of combined heat and power, known as cogeneration, is to recover and make beneficial use of this heat, and, as a result, the overall efficiency of the conversion process is increased. Beside its high efficiency, CHP results in the reduction of environmental pollutants (CO2, SO2, SOx, and, NOx emissions) by about 13-18%.In order to make the CHP units more efficiently, economic dispatch is applied to determine the optimized solution to satisfy the load demand of system. The mutual dependencies of heat and power generation introduce a complication in the integration of cogeneration units into the power economic dispatch (Vasebi et al. 2007).
