Optimising power generation efficiency for head-sensitive cascaded reservoirs in a competitive electricity market

This paper is on the problem of short-term hydro scheduling (STHS), particularly concerning head-sensitive reservoirs under competitive environment. We propose a novel method, based on nonlinear programming (NLP), for optimising power generation efficiency. This method considers hydroelectric power generation as a nonlinear function of water discharge and of the head. The main contribution of this paper is that the maximum water discharge, thus giving the maximum power generation, is also considered as head-dependent in order to obtain more realistic and feasible results. The proposed method has been applied successfully to solve a case study based on one of the Portuguese cascaded hydro systems, providing a higher profit at an acceptable computation time in comparison with classical optimisation methods based on linear programming (LP) that ignore head dependence.