Short-term Unit Commitment Using Advanced Direct Load Control

In recent years, there is a tendency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions internationally in consideration of environmental problems. In the field of electric power systems, the introduction of renewable energy power generation facilities centered on photovoltaic power generation is being promoted in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, if these power generation facilities are introduced excessively, a duck curve phenomenon occurs in which the operating efficiency of the thermal power generator is poor. Currently, we are reducing the output of photovoltaic power generation equipment to avoid the duck curve phenomenon. In order to suppress the output, it is not possible to further install renewable energy power generation equipment, and the limit of introduction comes with a fixed amount. Therefore, this paper proposes a new load demand control method that improves the duck curve phenomenon without hindering the introduction of renewable energy power generation equipment. In addition, in order to make the proposed method more active, the usual unit commitment has a time interval of 1 hour, but at the same time, we also devised a time interval of 30 minutes. We show that by performing a short-term unit commitment using the proposed method, the optimal operation can be performed even when a large amount of renewable energy power generation is introduced.