Impact of New Energy Technologies on Generation Scheduling

Certain practices for the scheduling and dispatching of electric generation have become commonplace in the utility industry. These methods all take advantage of the fact that the generation for a power system is normally supplied from a small number of large units connected to the high voltage transmission system. Most of the new generation technologies, however, are much smaller in unit size and may be well dispersed. In this paper a critical examination is made of the impact of these new technologies on the generation scheduling methods. No particular technology is examined in detail but the general characteristics of all the new technologies are taken into consideration. The scheduling practices considered range from the real time load frequepcy control and economic dispatch to the weekly (short term) and yearly (long term) scheduling of generating units. It is shown that the impact will be significant and the exact effects will depend on the level of penetration, the extent of dispersion, ownership, and the weather dependency of the technologies selected.