Multi-objective economic emission dispatch considering combined heat and power by normal boundary intersection method

Pollutant gas emission concern is one of the most challenging issues in electric power systems putting excessive pressure on different participants of electricity markets. Integrating renewable energy sources and application of Combined Heat-and-Power to thermal power plants which are applied by system operators have many advantages, such as reducing green-house gas emission. This paper addresses a multi-objective electric model to integrate the generation of thermal units considering heat and power dispatch. The objective functions of the proposed multi-objective framework comprise simultaneous minimization of cost and thermal units' emission as well as maximizing heat generation. Normal-Boundary Intersection method is implemented to solve the proposed model and TOPSIS decision making approach has been employed to find the optimal Pareto solution as the best tradeoff between cost, green-house gas emission and heat generation. The results obtained in this paper are compared with the ones derived from other techniques recently used and verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed multi-objective method. Besides, it is found that the solutions obtained by incorporating the lexicographic optimization and Normal Boundary Intersection method are exceptional in the case of fuel cost, emission and execution time.