Renewable Energies in Medium-Term Power Planning

The medium-term generation planning over a yearly horizon for generation portfolios including hydro generation and non-dispatchable renewables such as wind power and solar photovoltaic generation reveals how the penetration of these technologies reduces the share of other technologies and how it changes the profits and the profit spread in liberalized electricity markets. The matching of the load duration curves in different periods and the forced outages of generation units are here addressed through probabilistic methods and a heuristic is employed to guess which of the load-matching constraints may be active at the solution. There are well-established models for hydro generation in medium-term planning, but specific models are necessary to account for wind power and photovoltaic generation. A proposal for these is made in this work, which is suitable for use in the load duration curve matching through probabilistic methods. Moreover the stochasticity of the renewable sources requires the use of stochastic programming employing scenario trees, here developed using quasi-Monte Carlo techniques. Medium-term pumping schemes are also considered. Several realistic cases will be solved for two behavioral principles of a pure pool market: endogenous cartel and equilibrium.