Thermoelectric dispatch: From utopian planning to reality

Brazil experienced an electricity crisis during 2013-2015, with some blackouts, a high risk of not having enough supply to meet the demand, and skyrocketing electricity prices. In a country in which hydropower historically accounts for more than 80% of power generation, the lack of water in the reservoirs leads to such crisis. The hypothesis of the present study is that the significant depletion of the reservoirs in Brazil from 2011 to 2015 was the result of a combination of factors: the divergence between the planning and execution of the expansion of power generation and transmission, the weakness of the NEWAVE dispatch software used by the government (a stochastic dual dynamic programming, which calculates how much thermal and hydroelectric energy should be generated to meet the current demand), and the below-average hydrology in 2014 and 2015. To avoid the issue of project planning in the projections made in this paper, the authors analyzed the projects that are under construction, study, or development and made some schedule adjustments. The NEWAVE software was also adjusted by reducing the producibility factor of dispatchable hydropower plants. As a result, in the scenario with Newave adjustments, the thermoelectric dispatch-and thus the natural gas consumption-were on average 65% higher.