Integrating Wind Farms and Pumped Storage Plants in Power System Unit Commitment Using Modified Particle Swarm Optimization

Wind energy as a main part of renewable energy has important role in many electricity industries, because of increasing concerns about environmental impacts of conventional power plants fuels. Wind power integration in the electricity system operation has some technical and economic effects because of the intermittent and variety nature of wind power production. Therefore, it is important for every utility or system operator to consider these technical or economical aspects especially as unit commitment problem. One of the most important strategies for increasing profits of each utility is integrating the wind power resources with limited energy resources such as pumped storage (PS) plants. Pumped storage can provide some of the flexibility that power system operators need to balance load and generation in an uncertain environment, and thus enhance a power system’s ability to incorporate wind power. This paper presents a new approach for solving the weekly unit commitment including wind farms and PS plants. For this purpose, the modified PSO mechanism is recommended. The proposed PSO is applied to two test systems (which are included two wind farms and one PS plant) and the results of this modified PSO are compared with the conventional PSO. Evaluation of the results of these test systems’ solutions show that better optimal schedules are obtained.