Maximizing hydro share in peak demand of power systems long-term operation planning

• Hydrothermal systems long-term operation planning considering instantaneous demand.
• Inclusion of the hydro generation to meet peak demand in the objective function.
• Improvement in the operation planning without high impact in economic operation.

This paper presents an improvement in the long-term hydrothermal system operation planning by including peak generation as a decision variable in the simulations, in order to better operate the hydro plants. Although this has been widely considered in the short-term, the objective is to correctly set the power system operation planning to avoid instantaneous shortages and blackouts. Thus, the instantaneous generation capacity is included in the objective function in order to better consider this variable in long-term operation planning. The results show that it is possible to significantly increase peak power by simply modifying the operation of hydro plants. Moreover, this approach does not present a significant increase in the operation costs.