Fast Relax-and-Round Unit Commitment with Topological Constraints

RESUMO

Recent developments in the US knowledge economy have created a significant growth in datacenter loads, with two major consequences for power generation. First, to compensate for growth in load, datacenters are encouraged to bring their own generating units. Second, in search of the remaining pools of dispatchable generation, utilities are increasingly turning to subtransmission and distribution level generating assets. Coupled with increasing loads and the resulting tighter grid conditions, both trends are likely to create a need to commit a large number of localized generating units under grid constraints. We propose an extension of Relax-and- Round Unit Commitment (RRUC) that is capable of committing generating units for larger problems faster than conventional methods, while staying within intertemporal and spatial MVA constraints. We demonstrate the performance of RRUC using synthetic congestible test systems ranging from 100 to 20,000 buses. RRUC consistently finds low cost solutions, independent of the problem size, and its run time increases sub-quadratically in the number of buses. RRUC can solve the 100 bus system in less than a second and the 20,000 bus system 7 minutes. In contrast, a leading state of the art solver cannot find a feasible solution to the 100 bus system in 15 minutes.