Short-Term Hydrothermal Dispatch With River-Level and Routing Constraints

Recently, there has been a growing need to consider issues related to multiple uses of water-such as navigation, fishing, or recreation-in the operation planning of electrical power systems, specially in predominantly hydro systems. In short-term models, it is of particular importance to consider maximum/minimum values and ramp limits for the stream level of a river. However, in order to properly represent such constraints, it is also necessary to model in detail the river routing, i.e., the water wave propagation along the channels that connect reservoirs in cascade. This paper proposes a linear programming model to represent river stream-level constraints and river-routing effects in the short-term hydrothermal dispatch problem. Results show the high accuracy of the proposed approach to represent maximum hourly and daily river-level variations as well as the impacts of taking into account a detailed representation of river routing in the operation of hydrothermal systems.