Unbiased economic dispatch in control areas with conventional and renewable generation sources

•Economic dispatch problem for a power system control area with thermal, hydel, wind, distributed solar and pumped-hydel generation is developed.•Non-traditional cost functions are introduced for wind power and hydel generation.•Non-dispatchable nature of solar PV generation is pointed out.•PSO and SA are used separately to solve the optimization problem.

This paper describes an economic dispatch formulation for a power system control area with high penetration of renewable generation and energy storage. We develop a comprehensive objective function that is unbiased to both the conventional and renewable generation sources. Operating constraints of conventional sources are considered, wind turbine generation is treated as a dispatchable source, and solar photovoltaic generation as negative load. A simulated annealing and particle swarm optimization algorithm are separately applied to minimize the objective function. The results obtained by the proposed economic dispatch formulation show that even a variable energy resource like wind can be dispatched in a manner that benefits the control area as a whole.