Coordinated dispatch of regional transmission organizations: Theory and example

In this paper we consider the coordination of economic dispatch across multiple Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) to optimize interchange levels, including consideration of the coordination of “congestion relief” as practiced in the Eastern Interconnection of North America. The approach involves the formulation of a hierarchical optimization problem where the interchange and the allocation of shared transmission capacity are decision variables in the upper-level problem. We provide necessary conditions for achieving jointly optimal dispatch across multiple RTOs and develop a basic coordination algorithm from the necessary conditions. An example serves to illustrate the coordination.