Impact of load management on the energy management strategy of a wind-short hydro hybrid system in frequency based pricing

•This paper presents a new profit centric operating strategy of a hybrid power system under market environment.•The profit is ensured by optimal coordination of RES and load management approach.•The problem is formulated as dynamic optimization problem and solved using ABC algorithm.•Comparison shows that the proposed approach results more profit for the hybrid system.

In the post restructuring era of electrical power system, each of the generating farm or utility has its own business strategy in terms of generation planning, load management and for other decisions. The basic objective of the utility is to maximize the operational profit for a given period of time. Generation scheduling for a utility with wind farm largely depends on the accuracy of wind power prediction. Therefore, it is important to explore the suitability of load management approach in coordination with the use of energy storage facility to compensate the uncertainty in wind power generation. This paper focuses mainly the operating strategy of a grid connected small hybrid power system to maximize its profit by adopting coordination between load management technique and utilization of storage plant under frequency based pricing. The optimum load scheduling has been implemented to utilities own local load. An hourly-discretized optimization algorithm is proposed and solved using artificial bee colony algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the optimization problem is solved for varied wind power scenarios with different demand expectations cases in a day ahead Indian electricity market. It is noted that the proposed load management approach results more profit for the hybrid system because of better power management compared to the case when load scheduling has not been incorporated. The solution of the proposed optimization algorithm gives the strategies to be followed by the hybrid system how to operate its pump storage unit and to serve its local load in next hours.