Water-constrained optimal operations of power grid with renewable integration

With population growth and economic development, energy demand has also increased in the past decades. This demand increase, and the new distributed technologies that have been introduced into the power grid, require it to be capable of handling large amounts of power and information flowing from the system operator to the end-users, and vice versa, to provide the end-users reliable, sustainable, affordable and robust energy supply. In this paper, an optimization model that finds optimal power generators operations considering the optimal power flow problem and most importantly water limitations is proposed and tested. More specifically, a mixed integer programming model is formulated for decision-making, such as scheduling and power production of generators, transmission line switching, load shedding, and water usage, by robust optimization for capturing the uncertainties of renewable power generation. To solve the mentioned problem, the model is reformulated to apply the column-and-constraint generation algorithm, and perform numerical experiments on several test cases to validate the proposed model and algorithm. Sensitivity analysis was performed to check the water availability effects on the power system, and the effects of technological developments on the generator units side that make them require lower amount of water usage for power generation.