Multiperiod Hydrothermal Economic Dispatch by an Interior Point Method

This paper presents an interior point algorithm to solve the multiperiod hydrothermal economic dispatch (HTED). The multiperiod HTED is a large scale nonlinear programming problem. Various optimization methods have been applied to the multiperiod HTED, but most neglect important network characteristics or require decomposition into thermal and hydro subproblems. The algorithm described here exploits the special bordered block diagonal structure and sparsity of the Newton system for the first order necessary conditions to result in a fast efficient algorithm that can account for all network aspects. Applying this new algorithm challenges a conventional method for the use of available hydro resources known as the peak shaving heuristic.